Remembering Marga Minco: An Influential War Writer and Award-Winning Author

Jul 14, 2023 at 10:04 PMUpdate: 2 hours ago

Writer Marga Minco passed away on Monday 10 July. This is evident from an obituary that her family in NRC has posted. Minco is best known for her debut The bitter herb, which appeared in 1957. Minco was 103 years old.

Minco was buried in a private circle. The obituary reads: “Our wonderful, sweet, witty, special, indestructible mother has passed away.”

Marga Minco is a pseudonym. Minco was born on March 31, 1920 as Sara Menco into an Orthodox Jewish family in Ginneken en Bavel in Brabant. Her parents were arrested during the war, but she managed to escape and survived by going into hiding. Her parents, brother and sister died.

She was married to the poet Bert Voeten, who died in 1992.

‘War Writer’

Despite her war past, Minco sometimes made a cautious attempt to get rid of the label ‘war writer’. “I don’t write as a victim, I write,” she said.

Yet she could not ignore it in practice: the fate of the Jews during and after the Second World War was her theme. Minco already established her name as a ‘war writer’ The bitter herb.

In this “little chronicle”, as she herself called it, she describes how she narrowly escaped deportation in May 1943. Minco sneaks out of her house on Sarphatistraat in Amsterdam through a garden gate and is the only member of the family to survive the war.

Winner PC Hooftprijs

Minco has won several awards for her books. She received the PC Hooft Prize (2019) at the age of 98. This is one of the most important oeuvre prizes for Dutch-language authors.

“Marga Minco’s novels and stories give shape to existential experiences such as fear, guilt, loneliness and a deep but hard to articulate longing for security,” the jury wrote at the time. “Without psychologizing, without pathos or pretense, she makes an inscrutable reality palpable and imaginable.”

Minco has previously received the Constantijn Huygens Prize (2005) and the Annie Romein Prize (1999). For The bitter herb she immediately received the Multatuli Prize in 1957. The bitter herb was filmed in 1985 by director Kees van Oostrum, but Minco distanced himself from that film.

2023-07-14 20:04:54
#Marga #Minco #author #bitter #herb #died #age #Book #Culture