James Stratton Holmes (2 May 1924 – 6 November 1986) was an American-Dutch poet, translator, and translation scholar. He sometimes published his work using his real name James S. Holmes, and other times the pen names Jim Holmes and Jacob Lowland. In 1956 he was the first non-Dutch translator to receive the prestigious Martinus Nijhoff Award, the most important recognition given to translators of creative texts from or into Dutch.
Mathilda (Til) Brugman (16 September 1888, Amsterdam – 24 July 1958, Gouda) was a Dutch author, poet, translator, and linguist.
Josephus Carel Franciscus (Jef) Last (2 May 1898 in The Hague – 15 February 1972 in Laren) was a Dutch poet, writer, translator and cosmopolitan.Jef Last was a writer and socially compassionate man. He had a Catholic background. However, he was very young member of the SDAP and the "AJC". With these principles, he could not practice as an assistant manager of the Enka in Ede, and eventually he resigned.He left the revisionist social democracy to become a member of Henk Sneevliet's Revolutionary Socialist Party. With his revolutionary friend André Gide, he traveled in the summer of 1936 to the Soviet Union. The pair was well received, but saw through the organized tribute and returned to the west disillusioned. Much later Last wrote a book about his friendship with Gide.He last fought in the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigades, which was on the side of the Spanish Republic. As a result, he lost his Dutch citizenship because of military service for a foreign power. Shortly after the Second World War, his citizenship was returned.From 1950 to 1953, he lived in Indonesia, particularly in Singaraja (Bali), where he worked as a teacher at a secondary school. He was friends with president Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta.
Gerrit Jan Komrij (30 March 1944 – 5 July 2012) was a Dutch poet, novelist, translator, critic, polemic journalist and playwright. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s, writing poetry that sharply contrasted with the free-form poetry of his contemporaries. He acquired a reputation for his prose in the late 1970s, writing acerbic essays and columns often critical of writers, television programs, and politicians. As a literary critic and especially as an anthologist he had a formative influence on Dutch literature: his 1979 anthology of Dutch poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, reformed the canon, and was followed by anthologies of Dutch poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries, of Afrikaans poetry, and of children's poetry. Those anthologies and a steady stream of prose and poetry publications solidified his reputation as one of the country's leading writers and critics; he was awarded the highest literary awards including the P. C. Hooft Award (1993), and from 2000 to 2004, he was the Dutch Dichter des Vaderlands (Poet Laureate). Komrij died in 2012 at age 68.