The Author

Derk Cools is born in 1939 in Den Haag / The Hague, the  Netherlands. After high school, he enters the university of Utrecht and gets his degree of human geography and economics.  In 1965, he joins the Army and finally  serves as lieutenant. As a civil servant with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, he becomes an expert in regional economic planning, technology development and international economic and industrial cooperation. He publishes several papers on integrated planning for the OECD.  After the fall of the Berlin wall, he helps to develop and apply  programs for industrial restructuring in previous East European countries as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania.  In 1994, he retires and moves to the Netherlands Antilles, the island of Curacao in the Caribbean..


Since 1995, he frequently travels to the Midwest of America, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and further to Montana, Wyoming, California (in 1994- 1999), to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand (in 1999 and 2005) and to Central America, Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize (in 2004) and Nicaragua and Costa Rica (in 2005).




In 2002, his  book   'Met de Hoed tegen het Licht' (reizen door Zuid-oost Azië) is published. In a way, it's a travel book, but also a meditation of life. The haiku poet Bashõ is his comrade on the road.
In 2009, he returns to South east Asia and particularly Laos and its former capital Luang Prabang. He travels also to Indonesia, Bali and West Papua. At the end of 2009, a new booklet is edited, entitled Seven days in the Baliemvalley, West Papua ( in dutch: Zeven dagen in de Baliemvallei. And again, it is a spiritual journey and an experiment in mental geography.  In 2011, he writes and publishes a more or less historical documentary book about his aunt, 'Een dochter van Epicurus', you can order through www .amazon.de in Europe or outside the EU via lulu.com  It contains a sketch of the post-War years in the Netherlands, the setting of the life of his aunt, a social democrat and Epicurist in practice.


Apart from writing, he loves literature, hiking ,swimming and jeu de boules. His recent  favourites are books of the German author W.G. Sebald, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the French novelist le Clézio, the modern Dutch poet Nachoem Wijnberg and the Portugese author Antonio Lobo Antunes.


At times he writes haikus. A kind of hubris.