Nederlands English

Jack Didden

You already know my name—otherwise, you wouldn’t have ended up here. I was born in 1952 in Waalwijk and have been living in Drunen for the past few years. After secondary school, I studied English at KUN and became an English teacher in 1974 (at Dr. Mollercollege in Waalwijk since 1978). In 2012, I earned my doctorate for research on a German battle group. The public edition of that work became the book “Autumn Gale.”

In 2017, I retired as a teacher. As long as I breathe, I’ll keep doing research and writing books.

Greetings!

I’ve been interested in the Second World War since I was young, but only later did I discover how much had yet to be written—especially about the Eastern Front. After the success of my first book, which I co-wrote with my good friend Maarten Swarts in 1979, I truly got the taste for it. Together, Maarten and I have produced quite a number of books on the war.

Apart from the Second World War (on which I now own about sixteen meters of books), I am deeply interested in fantastic literature—specifically fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Tolkien is of course the revered Master to me (I even own the first Dutch edition), but there are others as well: Bram Stoker, Sheridan LeFanu, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and of course my good friend Paul van Loon. In fact, he is the one who got me into writing for children. But more about that on the relevant page.

Oh yes, I have plenty of other hobbies too—no chance of getting bored (how do people even manage that?): airplanes, Marten Toonder (Heer Bommel and Tom Poes), Jeroen Brouwers (Dutch literature), building model aircraft (especially Luftwaffe 1939–1945), painting, comic books (Tardi, brilliant!), Symbolist visual art (late nineteenth century), just to name a few…