Boudewijn Büch

Dutch writer, poet and television presenter, known for his confabulations.

He was born in a Catholic family, but often stated that he was of Jewish origin. His parents were Marinus Reinirus Buch (7 December 1917, Den Haag - ?), a civil servant and Alida Johanna Elfers (1921, wassenaar), who married in 1942 and divorced in 1961. They got six sons, of which Boudewijn and his brother Menno Buch (19 August 1951 - 8 July 2014, Amsterdam) became known as TV-presenters. The father was described as a tyrant, though Boudewijn would make a hero of him in his "autobiographical" books.

Büch went to the elitist Bonaventura-gymnasium in Leiden and boasted a lot about his background. He was interested in world literature and made it to the school-paper, but being too restless to study the more boring facts of life, he could not finish the higher civil school and was in 1967 degraded to the MULO school that did not give access to the Universities. Büch got simple jobs but studied for the MO diploma of Dutch teacher in the evening. But on his papers he used impressive titles like "Drs. Drs. Boudewijn Ignatius Maria Büch, MLS, psychofarmahistoricus" suggesting that he was a highly educated scholar.

His enthusiasm, charm and erudite remarks impressed many artists, intellectuals and scholars of Dutch literature. A professor in Leiden even gave Büch his book collection after his death, being convinced that he had to do with a great connoisseur. Büch was indeed a bibliophile, who at the time of his death possessed approximately 100,000 books.

One of Büch's long-lived lies was that he was the father of the child Boudewijn Iskander that had died at the age of six (January 1976). Boudewijn Iskander indeed existed, but was just the child of a befriended family, not hi child and did not die. This theme formed the basis of his best-seller "De kleine blonde dood" (The small blond death, 1982), that was supposed to be a tragic ego document. In 1993 the novel was filmed.