In 1964 he made his literary debut with Het mes op de keel (The Knife to the Throat).

[2] Jeroen Brouwers was born on 30 April 1940 in Batavia, the capital of the former Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia).

After the Japanese invasion of Java in 1942 and KNIL's capitulation, his father was sent to a POW camp near Tokyo, Japan.

In 1986 Jeroen wrote the autobiographical novel Bezonken Rood (translated in 1988 as Sunken Red), about the lifelong effects of this Japanese internment.

Upon leaving secondary school in 1955, Brouwers did military service from 1958 to 1961, after which he started working as an apprentice journalist for De Gelderlander a Dutch provincial newspaper.

After quarreling with his CEO Julien Weverbergh Brouwers resigned from Manteau and devoted himself full-time to literature.

After a period in Warnsveld, Netherlands, he moved to Exel (a village in the Dutch municipality of Lochem).

In 2007 the Taalunie (Language Union) awarded Brouwers the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, a prize presented every three years to a Dutch-language author for his or her entire oeuvre.