P. J. (Paulina Jacoba) Cohen de Vries

Born in Amsterdam on April 10, 1884, Paulina Jacoba "Lien" de Vries trained as a teacher and earned her teaching certificate at just sixteen. In 1905 she began working at an Amsterdam school for poor children, experience that would later shape much of her writing.

She published as P. J. Cohen de Vries after marrying music teacher Michel Cohen in 1908. According to Dutch literary reference sources, she debuted as a children's author in 1920 with Het Druivejurkje; een sprookje and wrote across several forms, including fairy tales, school stories, animal tales, girls' books, and verse.

Her best-known work is Kinderen uit m'n klas (1922), a series of vivid sketches centered on individual children, first published in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. A follow-up, Uit de school geklapt, appeared in 1923. She died in Hilversum on April 19, 1923, at only thirty-nine, leaving behind a small but memorable body of writing rooted in the real life of the classroom.