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Louis Boon
Life Time
15 March 1912 - 10 May 1979
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Louis Paul Boon (1912–1979) was a Belgian writer and journalist. Winner of national and international literary awards. He wrote in Flemish. Louis-Paul Boon was born on March 15, 1912 in Alst, Belgium, to a working-class family. At the age of sixteen, he left school to help his father in his painting artel. In the evenings and on weekends, Boon attended the local Academy of Fine Arts, but was forced to stop classes due to lack of funds. In 1936, the future writer married. With the outbreak of World
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Louis Paul Boon (1912–1979) was a Belgian writer and journalist. Winner of national and international literary awards. He wrote in Flemish.
Louis-Paul Boon was born on March 15, 1912 in Alst, Belgium, to a working-class family. At the age of sixteen, he left school to help his father in his painting artel. In the evenings and on weekends, Boon attended the local Academy of Fine Arts, but was forced to stop classes due to lack of funds. In 1936, the future writer married. With the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the army, was captured by the Germans. Returning to occupied Belgium, he got a job as a glassmaker. Wartime includes the first literary experiments of Louis-Paul Boon. In 1942, he unexpectedly received the Leo Crane Prize for his novel The Suburbs Grows. The manuscript was secretly sent to the contest by the writer’s wife.
After the war, Louis-Paul Boon worked as a journalist for several years. His prose was considered immoral in his native Belgium, and the writer was not published. Boon gained fame in his homeland only after his books were published in the neighbouring more tolerant Netherlands. In the rest of Europe, he was recognized after the publication of German translations of the novels “Capellekens Street” (1953) and “Summer in Ter Muren” (1956). From this point on, Boon was considered a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he never got the prestigious award. In 1969, Louis-Paul Boon practically left his studies in literature, devoting himself to painting. The writer died on May 15, 1979 at the age of 67. Boon’s posthumous fame is associated with his later erotic novels Mike Maike’s Indecent Youth (1972) and Eros and the Lonely Man (1980).