Alfred van Cleef (1954) worked for many years as an international reporter for NRC Handelsblad and is now is a full-time author. Since 1978 he has been working as a journalist and correspondent for major newspapers and magazines from Madagascar, South Korea, Ghana, Benin, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, Greece and many other countries.
In 1994 he wrote the highly praised The Lost World of the Berberovic Family, about the fate of a family during the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. This was followed by The Lost Island in 1999, which was also published in Germany and the United States. In 2002 he wrote his first novel, Longing and the travel book The Hidden Order was awarded Best Travel Story 2010 by the Dutch Travel Bookstores, and has been sold to Mare Verlag in Germany. The German translation has been awarded the ITB Book Award 2013 for Extraordinary Travel Books and is longlisted for the Austrian Scientific Book of the Year 2012 (Natural Sciences and Technics). In 2014 we published a reissued edition of The Lost World in which Alfred van Cleef looks back on the war in former Yugoslavia, some twenty years later.
The Author is fluent in English, French, German, Dutch and Swiss German and has a basic understanding of Spanish, Italian and Norwegian.
