Louis Paul Boon

Louis Paul Boon was born on March 15, 1912 in Aalst, Flanders, Belgium.

In September 1939, Boon was mobilised and stationed as a soldier in Gooik and Tessenderlo. Boon was moved to Veldwezelt at the outbreak of World War II in May 1940 in order to defend the Albert Canal. However, he was captured as a prisoner of war on the first day and eventually sent home, after a few weeks in a prisoner camp. His experiences during the War and mostly the Occupation are the subject of Boon's fourth book, My Little War (1947).

After writing an unpublished novel, Boons official debut came in 1942 with De voorstad groeit (The suburb grows). It was award the Leo J. Krynprijs at the recommendation of Willem Elsschot.

Boon started working as a journalist for the communist daily De Rode Vaan (1945-1946), Front (1946-1947) and De Vlaamse Gids (1948). Later he contributed to the newspaper Vooruit with which he established himself as a freelancer. In subsequent years, Boon continued to combine newspaper and literary work, and will even add painting and sculpture to his activities.

In 1969, he stopped writing (except for his columns) and devoted himself to painting.

Boon was thought to have been shortlisted for a Nobel Prize in Literature in the late 1970s, and even received an invitation to appear at the Swedish Embassy, probably to be told that the Prize had been awarded to him. The day before the appointment he died at his writing table of a heart attack.

Between the '50s and Boon's death in 1979, his authorial focus narrowed to two main interests: politics and sex. While maintaining his socialist-anarchist commitment to the underdog, Boon became more and more interested in the production of erotic literature. He began collecting photographs of naked or barely dressed women in 1954, and had, by the time of his death, nearly 24,000 pictures of this kind, all of them meticulously classified in various thematic series. In his writing too, he began to display a penchant for teenage girls, and as time went by, this interest-which was by no means kept a secret from his readers-began to dominate his work. It's not unlikely that his predilections in this arena cost him the Nobel Prize, for which he'd been nominated many years in a row.

He was a writer and actor, known for Vergeten straat (1999), De witte (1980) and Menuet (1982). He was married to Jeanneke de Wolf.