Herman Rudolf "Rudy" Kousbroek (1 November 1929 – 4 April 2010) was a Dutch poet, translator, writer and first of all essayist.

His principal work is the book Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom (The East Indian Camp Syndrome), a compilation of critical essays that are in one way or the other related to the Dutch East Indies and clearly show his admiration for Dutch Indo-Eurasian authors like E. du Perron, Tjalie Robinson, Beb Vuyk as well as Indonesian intellectual Sutan Sjahrir.

[1] Rudy Kousbroek was born in Pematang Siantar, on the isle of Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies.

Indonesian and Indo Eurasian culture and literature as well as the aftermath of colonialism remained a lifelong interest.

They had many interests in common: the scientific worldview, cars, typewriters, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, surrealism, atheism, literature.

Kousbroek has translated Exercices de style by Raymond Queneau (Stijloefeningen, 1978) and wrote an introduction to the Dutch translation of Ombres chinoises by Simon Leys (Chinese schimmen, 1976; in English: Chinese shadows), a book that encouraged intellectuals in the Western world to revise their image of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution.

Kousbroek's magnum opus is Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom (The East Indian Camp Syndrome).

[5] The book is primarily a polemic with the spokesmen of the (r)emigrated people from the Dutch East Indies after the end of the Dutch colonial period, most notably among them Jeroen Brouwers, who holds the view, mistakenly and implicitly racist according to Kousbroek, that the hardships of the Japanese concentration camps in the East Indies during World War II are of the same order of atrocity as the hardships of the German concentration camps in Europe.

The book contains also reminiscences of Kousbroek's youth in the Dutch East Indies, essays on related literature, and reviews.