author
August P. van Groeningen
1866–1894
A gifted Dutch writer and schoolteacher, he wrote with unusual sympathy for people living on society’s margins. His career was brief, but his fiction and journalism left a striking impression for their social conscience and emotional intensity.
1 Audiobook
Een nest menschen
by August P. van Groeningen
About the author
Born August Pieter Barendrecht in 1866, he became known as August P. van Groeningen and worked as a teacher in Rotterdam. Dutch literary sources describe him as a prose writer who also wrote poems, plays, and articles, and note that he was introduced into the circle around De Nieuwe Gids in the late 1880s.
His work stood out for its attention to ordinary and struggling people. He also contributed for a time to a socialist weekly under the pseudonym Willem van Oevere, which fits the strong concern for social injustice seen in his writing.
His life was very short: he died in Rotterdam in 1894, two days before his 28th birthday, from tuberculosis. Even so, he is remembered as a distinctive late 19th-century Dutch voice whose work combined literary ambition with deep feeling for the lives of the poor.