Tonke Dragt was born in Jakarta in 1930 and spent most of his youth in Indonesia. In 1941 war broke out in the East, Japan invaded Dutch India, and Dragt, aged 12, ended up in a Japanese camp with his mother and two little sisters. There, inspired by Jules Verne, she writes her first "book". After the war in 1945, she moved with her family to the Netherlands and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, becoming a teacher of drawing. In 1961 his first book appeared: Adventures of Two Different Twins. A year later, Letter to the King arrived, which was chosen Best Youth Book of the Year and in 2004 he received the Griffel der Griffels ("Prize of the Prizes") in his country, recognizing it as the best youth book of the last fifty years. In 1976 Tonke was awarded for the set of her work with the National Prize for Children's and Youth Literature.