Hans Verhagen (3 March 1939 – 10 April 2020[1]) was a Dutch journalist, poet, painter and filmmaker, born in Vlissingen.

He gained the P. C. Hooft Award in 2009 "for his humour, his engagement, his poetic daring and whimsy.

"[2] Verhagen began writing poetry at the start of the 1960s at the same time as he was using drugs.

There is an enormous intensification: everything that has been said and done seems to come together in one place, a kind of diamond.” Applying this experience to poetry he "discovered that you could achieve a maximum power with a minimum of material.”[3] The poems themselves are written in sequences made up of short sections bringing in all kinds of contemporary and scientific material: Tongue in cheek, he later characterised such New Realist writing as "full of misplaced symbolism and defective imagery, quasi-mysticism coupled with an abuse of technical terms.

"[5] With the appearance of Duizenden zonsondergangen (Thousands of sunsets, 1971) Verhagen shifted into the sentimental mode of the Dutch renewal of Neo Romanticism.