By then his mother already had three daughters from her first marriage to a Royal Dutch East Indies Army KNIL officer of Indo-European descent.

As a survivor of the Junyo Maru disaster, which had been mistakenly torpedoed by the British, his father performed forced labour as a POW on the Pakan Baroe railroad on Sumatra.

Adriaan van Dis's mother's first husband was a resistance fighter and was decapitated during the Japanese occupation (1942–1945).

Bergen aan Zee was home to many people who had come from the Dutch East Indies and Adriaan grew up in a house that he shared with four repatriated families of mostly Indo-European descent.

He initiated and implemented the school journal "De Blaer" (The Blister), together with editor Cees Breure and illustrator Henk Jansen.

Van Dis also identified with the charged discussions of skin color in South African literature.

In 1979 he received his doctoral degree with a dissertation about a text by the author Breyten Breytenbach, who was to influence his later writing, and some of whose books van Dis has translated into Dutch.

In 1983 van Dis also made his debut as television presenter and became known in the Netherlands through a literary talk show.

Adriaan van Dis is a prolific writer whose work is very popular in the Netherlands, where he is a household name.

In 2008 he decided to briefly resume his television career with a 7-part series entitled "Van Dis in Afrika" in which he reported on his travels to Southern Africa.

"[5] Adriaan van Dis's work includes novels, novellas, short stories, essays, poetry and plays.

That simplicity is often deceptive and necessary to touch on subjects of a controversial and/or delicate nature, such as traumas of war, discrimination and abuse.