Rudy Kousbroek was born in 1929 on the island of Sumatra, the son of a Dutch landowner, and in 1946 he emigrated from the East Indies of the Netherlands with his family, after passing through Amsterdam, where he lived for four years. He settled for a long period in Paris, where he studied Japanese, Chinese and mathematics. In the fifties he was an experimental poet. In the 1960s he began publishing articles in Dutch newspapers and weeklies, as an independent cultural correspondent from Paris. In all, Kousbroek spent almost fifty years outside the Netherlands. Even so, he is considered the most important essayist of Dutch literature of the postwar period. In 1975 he won the P.C. Hooft, the most prestigious literary distinction in the Netherlands. In his work, Kousbroek addressed the drama of the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies from multiple angles. On this subject stands out his book Het Oostindisch Kampsyndroom (The syndrome of the field of imprisonment in the East Indies), of 1992, considered its capital work. In the last ten years of his life, in order to translate this characteristic amalgam between autobiographical memories and historical reflection, Rudy Kousbroek found an ideal and personal format, which he called "photosynthesis": a combination of a black and white photograph and a Short essay This particular genre earned him the Jan Hanlo 2005 prize, another important prize for Dutch-language essay writing. In 2010, the year of Kousbroek's death, all of his "photosynthesis" was published in a single large tome entitled "Openspoorde wonderen" (Tracing miracles).