Sybren Polet

Sybe Minnema (June 19, 1924 – July 19, 2015), known by his pen name Sybren Polet, was a Dutch prose writer and poet. He won numerous awards, among them the 2003 Constantijn Huygens Prize.
Born in Kampen, he worked as a teacher in Zwolle. After World War II he made his debut under his own name with the poetry collection "Genesis" (1946). As Sybren Polet he made his debut in 1949 in the literary magazine Podium, which he served from 1952 to 1965 as an editor. In 1961 he published his first novel "Breekwater" (Breakwater).
His work is counted among that of the Vijftigers, a literary movement from the 1950s in the Netherlands and Belgium.
His prose (novels and stories) has a strong experimental / innovative character, where the boundaries between genres and conventions structure and chronology split apart: dream and reality co-exist, past, present and future blend together; characters have no fixed properties. In this way he tried to articulate the complexity of existence, showing that it is anything but static and straightforward.
Polet also wrote plays and children's books and put together anthologies of poetry and science fiction (perhaps the first of their kind in Dutch). He died in Amsterdam at the age of 91 on 19 July 2015.