Jozef Adriaan Anna Geeraerts (23 February 1930 – 11 May 2015), better known as Jef Geeraerts, was a Belgian writer.

Geeraerts was born in Antwerp. After his studies in political and administrative sciences at the Colonial University of Belgium in Antwerp he became a colonial administrator in Belgian Congo. On the independence of the Congo he sent his wife and children back to Belgium and in August 1960 he himself returned to Belgium. During the next six years he was paid by the government (return program). After that time he needed to find a job to survive. He decided to become a writer and went to the University of Brussels to study Germanic languages.

Career as a writer

When he had finished his studies he wrote his first novel, Ik ben maar een neger ("I'm just a negro"), which put him on the map as extremely controversial. The book was based on his experience as mil…Read more on Wikipedia