Flemish author David Van Reybrouck has won the Dutch AKO Literature Prize 2010 with his book Congo. Een geschiedenis (Congo. A history).

He received a sculpture and 50.000 Euro. The writer said to donate a part of the money to Human Rights Watch and to buy himself time for… writing.

HarperCollins bought the rights for the English translation. The voluminous book will appear at Ecco Press.

The portrait of the artist

David Van Reybrouck (Bruges, 1971) was born into a Flemish family of florists, bookbinders, electricians and artists. He read archaeology and philosophy at the universities of Leuven and Cambridge and holds a doctorate from Leiden. He was a visiting scholar in Barcelona and Paris and a postdoctoral research fellow in the history department of Leuven. He lives in Brussels.

His first book was De plaag (The Plague, 2001). While working on his thesis on prehistoric architecture, the writer came across the accusation that the Belgian writer and Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck had plagiarised from the work of the South African author, journalist and physicist Eugène Marais, in his book La vie des termites (1926).

He decided to investigate the case himself. Eventually the book turned to being a cross between a travelogue and a literary whodunit set in post-apartheid South Africa.

As well as being a literary non-fiction writer, Van Reybrouck is an acclaimed playwright.

His first piece die Siel van die Mier (The Soul of the Ant, 2004), a monologue, tells the story of a retired entomologist musing over his years in post-independence Katanga. It toured for many years in Belgium and abroad and was awarded the prize for the best new play in the Netherlands and Flanders in 2004.

In 2007 his first novel, Slagschaduw (Cast Shadow), appeared.Missie (Mission, 2007), Van Reybrouck's latest piece, is a monologue based on in-depth interviews with old white missionaries in war-torn Eastern Congo. The play is still touring in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France until at least 2011

Ambitious and absorbing

Over the years, Van Reybrouck has travelled extensively throughout Africa. In May 2010, he finally published Congo. A History, an ambitious and absorbing history of Africa's most devastated country. Van Reybrouck wanted to write a book on Congo, giving voice to the Congolese themselves.

The result is a well succeeded mix of oral history and personal involvement, written with the distance of the historian and journalist, taking in account the literature on the subject, and the archives. Countless interviews with actors and participants of the history lived through and personal observations give it the flavour countless readers obviously can’t resist.

According to the jury of the AKO Prize Congo is “a skilfully constructed story about slavery and colonialism, resilience and surviving: both the work of a historian and a novelist”.

It is the right book at the right time: published 50 years after the independence of the country (1960) and written because the writer himself didn’t find such a book when he travelled to Congo for the first time. So he decided to write the book he missed.