Writers from Rotterdam

Piet Oege Bakker (10 August 1897 – 1 April 1960) was a Dutch journalist and writer. He was joint editor for many years of the weekly magazine Elseviers Weekblad.
His most famous work was the trilogy written between 1941 and 1946 dealing with the experiences of the street urchin Ciske Vrijmoeth, alias Ciske the Rat. These novels sold in their hundreds of thousands, and later appeared in translation in more than ten other countries. The story has been filmed twice, in 1955 and 1984, and a musical version ran from October 2007 to November 2009.

Jacob (Bob) den Uyl (27 March 1930, Rotterdam – 13/14 February, 1992 Rotterdam) was a Dutch writer of mostly short stories.
His writing style is mostly ironic and observant. The most prominent theme in his work is the purposelessness and absurdity of existence. His earlier work consists mostly of absurd stories. In his later work, the focus of his writing shifted to more autobiographic stories, mostly concerned with travels (by bicycle) in neighbouring countries of The Netherlands.
Recurring elements in his work are:

His experiences as a child during World War II
World War I
His love for bicycle racing
His alcohol use
The city of RotterdamDuring his lifetime Den Uyl won the following prizes in literature:

In 1965, the “Prozaprijs” conferred by the city of Amsterdam for 'Vogels Kijken'
In 1968, the “Anna Blaman Prijs” for 'Een zachte fluittoon'
In 1976, the “Multatuli-prijs” for 'Gods wegen zijn duister en zelden aangenaam'In 2004, the editorial board of the VPRO-Gids established the Bob den Uyl prize for travel stories. Several collected stories have been posthumously published. In 2008, Nico Keuning published Bob den Uyl's biography.

Gilles Quispel (30 May 1916 – 2 March 2006) was a Dutch theologian and historian of Christianity and Gnosticism. He was professor of early Christian history at Utrecht University.
Born in Rotterdam, after finishing secondary school in Dordrecht, Quispel studied classical philology from 1934 to 1941 at the Leiden University. At Leiden he also began to study theology, which he continued at the University of Groningen. Quispel completed his doctoral work in 1943 at Utrecht University with a dissertation examining the sources utilized in Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem. He devoted study to several Gnostic systems, particularly Valentinianism. In 1948-1949 he spent a year in Rome as a Bollingen fellow and was appointed professor of the history of the early Church at Utrecht University in 1951. Quispel served as a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1964-1965 and at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1968. He was engaged in first editing Nag Hammadi Codex I (the "Jung Codex") and devoted attention to the Nag Hammadi Library and particularly to the Gospel of Thomas throughout the rest of his career. Quispel also made contributions to the study of early "Jewish-Christian" traditions as well as Tatian's Diatessaron (a second-century gospel harmony). He died in El Gouna, Egypt.