Biographical notes on
jan bee landman
born in Middelburg, The Netherlands, on 13 January 1948. His lineage is half Dutch, one quarter Scottish and one quarter French. In 1953 he moved to Rotterdam where he completed his elementary education and qualified for the gymnasium, an old-fashioned grammar school with heavy emphasis on classical Greek and Latin. Moved by the revolutionary spirit of the sixties he started to write and rebel when 15. His writing led to editorships of a school magazine and a literary youth magazine, featured on national tv. His rebellion led to expulsion from school and rejection by the parents of a maiden deeply desired by him. This plunged him into bad company where his ruin seemed imminent but, with the aid of a good woman, he managed to recover. He studied English, became active in conservation work and settled down, after a few years' hard labour in the business world, as a sworn translator. Since then he has lived off his translations and divided the rest of his time between writing and horseriding. Most of the dozens of stories he has written have been published in small magazines in The Netherlands, Belgium, USA and Canada. In The Netherlands his entries in the annual SF competition always won high honours. In 1988 he won the Belgian Academy Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. In 1994 a collection of his short stories was published by Babel Publications. In 1996 he retired to the country and devoted himself mainly to his three horses and some research for a historical novel. In 2009 he resumed writing imaginative fiction.