F. Springer

Who was F. Springer?

F. Springer was the pseudonym of Carel Jan Schneider, a Dutch foreign service diplomat and writer.

Schneider was born in Batavia, Dutch East Indies. He spent World War II in a Japanese internment camp, and afterward lived and worked in New Guinea, New York, Bangkok, Brussels, Dhaka, Luanda, East Berlin, and Tehran all of which have served as locations for the novels and stories which he has published.

His laconic style has been compared to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Graham Greene, and he often adopts an ironic perspective on his often tragic subject matter, such as in Teheran, een zwanezang, a love story set against the background of the Iranian Revolution. Especially important in his work is the Netherlands Indies and the concept of tempo doeloe, the nostalgia associated with life in the former Dutch colonies in the East.

For Bougainville he received the Ferdinand Bordewijk award in 1982 and was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire work in 1995. He died in The Hague.