Guest: Frank van Dongen

Frank has been making up stories and creating things for as long as he can remember. As a child he created games that were so complicated that there could never be a winner. He painted and drew exotic and dystopian landscapes in the style of Don Lawrence and Frank Frazetta. He wrote stories about adventures on strange planets, stories that never ended because there was too much going on.

Frank has always had a fascination for fossils. To him, fossils are a window into the history of life on Earth, a story that remains almost as strange and unfathomable as that of the future of life on Earth, and beyond.

A major source of inspiration for the author are books and films in which humans travel to other worlds. The promise of human exploration of distant and unknown worlds, and that in the near future, is something that gives a wondrous and profound new dimension to life. In 1969, as a five-year-old, Frank saw this ‘dream’ come true in front of his eyes, via a small black-and-white television. The first man set foot on the Moon.

After finishing secondary school in Dordrecht, Frank went on to study evolutionary biology and palaeontology in Utrecht. He started work in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. In his time off he is always busy creating things: painting, making furniture and most of all writing. Frank has been working on the SF series Ontdekking van de Mens every day since 2016.

If there is one word that characterises the author, then it has to be creating. Making something out of nothing. And most of all, that something has to be different, thrilling and mysterious, adventurous and unpredictable.

Frank has three daughters and lives with his wife Diana among the trees of Almere-Hout.

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