Marjolijn de Cocq (b.1967) graduated in Translation
Studies in Amsterdam. Since 1994, she has worked
as a journalist. She reported on the Yugoslavia
Tribunal and the Lockerbie trial and led various
editorial boards at the GPD press agency. De Cocq
is the head of books and a columnist at Het Parool
newspaper and an author with the publisher
De Bezige Bij.

After the book launch of the Dutch edition of the bundled Writers’ Hotel columns, journalist Marjolijn de Cocq (the book coordinator of Het Parool) wrote an additional column. Please read her column below.

This extra column has been published in the English edition of the book. Both editions were published as promotional gifts and are not for sale in book shops. However, you are most welcome to read all twenty-seven columns in English on our website.

An Extraordinary Collection

There is always the same sigh from photographers when another writer’s interview has to be done at the writers’ hotel. They’ve already used up all of the backgrounds and locations. The library, the brasserie, the blue salon. Every sofa and canapé. Every alley around the corner, every bridge over the canal. What else could they do now?

This was the case when I first came to the Ambassade Hotel more than twenty years ago, it was the same two years ago — and I can only hope that it will be the case again, sometime.

My first interview in the writers’ hotel took place around the corner from the entrance, in the lobby. It was 1998, and Arnon Grunberg was the author of the Book Week Gift. I was young, he was even younger. Last week, he was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize, 2022, for his ‘novelistic universe’. He is still younger.

I know his favourite room number now. It was whispered to me last week by the hotel librarian, who curates the circa 5,500 signed books by their writer guests. I was briefly in there again. Because I’d been given the honour of accepting the first copy of an extraordinary collection.

The bookshops had closed during the winter lockdown early last year. Writers no longer had any tours, no readings, no signings, no award ceremonies. Let alone a Book Ball. And without writers, the writers’ hotel was no longer a writers’ hotel, when it had grown quiet and remained quiet even longer.

And so, a project was conceived within the walls of the Ambassade Hotel, under the working title Sheltering in the Writers’ Hotel. Writers were invited to come and stay, and to write about the effect of this stilled time on their writing lives. Unique stories were created, which each week found their way to the newspaper Het Parool to be the Writers’ Hotel column.

The launch of these collected columns was attended by a (very) small committee, with a (very) small number of followers online. Maybe, we thought, we’ll be able to hold a big party later, when it’s spring… My eyes flitted across the spines in the library, the titles calling to mind interviews from bygone years.

As the book coordinator of Het Parool, I was the cat with the cream once again this year. I travelled all over the world in books, unhindered. Hence the words that conclude Adriaan van Dis’s contribution, which are also the title of this lovingly produced book: ‘The best place for you to stay is ultimately a book.’

View the column on the website of ‘Het Parool’.

What is a writers’ hotel without writers? A pen without ink? For a period of six months in 2021, one author a week was invited to stay at the Ambassade Hotel and describe their writing lives at that time. Throughout the period May to November 2021, the newspaper Het Parool published the Writers’ Hotel columns in its weekly Arts Section.

Read more about this column project in collaboration with ‘Het Parool’ .

Would you like to stay at the writers’ hotel as well? Enjoy a unique experience in the Ambassade Hotel with these special offer packages or come and admire the library after visiting Brasserie Ambassade.

Jeroen Thijssen (b.1959) is an historian and writer.
He lives in ’s-Hertogenbosch. At the publisher Nieuw
Amsterdam, he has published Johannes van Dam:
The Biography (2018), The Hidden Village (2019),
and the novels Solitude (2014) and Hazer (2017),
as well as the novella The Return (2021). Books by
Thijssen have been on the longlists of the Libris
Literature Prize and the Brusse Prize.

Viewed from the Terrace

A young woman is walking on the other side of the Herengracht canal, with a candy-cane-pink hairdo, and a little dog on a leash that’s dragging its feet. The dog is wearing a white suit, with an Elvis collar. Its firm balls dangle from its long johns.

‘Come along, Katia,’ the young woman calls.

That’s a strange name for a dog. Maybe the animal is in transition. That’s the way big city life can be.

Many dogs around here are carried by their owner, probably handicapped animals that can no longer walk. In Paris, dogs have their own vagrants. Cats live in apartments with their private valets. Even pigeons have privileges, with their luxury apartments above the roofs, and daily catering on the street.

But over the last year, pigeons have been through a tough time. The tourists have stayed away, with dramatic results: no tourists, no pigeon catering.

That’s a business model with defects.

Writers also have a comparable business model. They sometimes write a book, they sell a few copies of it, they read from it. It doesn’t generate much money, but that’s merely incidental. They receive prestige and satisfaction as their psychological fee.

But suddenly, an invasive virus brings the whole world to a halt. Bookshops close, libraries close too, all podiums are shut down. And so, the psychological
fee disappears too. And the income, however modest that may be.

And there you go with your business model. It had been dealt a few vicious blows already by the first Rutte government. Minister Halbe the Destroyer, later better known as Halbe the Liar, his name generating the grinding of teeth.

Their disdain was even worse than the financial cuts. ‘Art is a hobby,’ said Minister Wiebes, who has also departed now. The government shouldn’t set aside money for hobbies, everyone ought to be able to pull their own weight.

His excellency often seemed to be a sound hole for his party, the conservative VVD.

For the sake of convenience, the sound hole forgot that the same government does actually subsidise other hobbies. Olympic swimmers, gymnasts, Keirin cyclists all receive an income from the government, which is so generous it enables them to get a mortgage.

Try saying that about artists. They get a kick in the teeth for their ‘hobbies’. Even the king prefers sport to reading.

And then you get a f***ing pandemic on top of it. Book sales gone, appearances gone, and afterwards, see above. The prestige that is already damaged now totally goes down the drain, together with the satisfaction and the most minimal of incomes.

The dog across the canal is now doing things that a human would use a toilet for. The owner keeps an eye out, and quickly walks on when she imagines she hasn’t been spotted, The dog trails behind her.

The lonely writer on the Ambassade’s terrace, on the far side of the Herengracht, goes up to his luxurious room, where he’s been given two nights stay. For nothing. Because he’s a writer and his hobby is more than a pastime, it has significance. Luckily, there are still places where they realise that.

View the column on the website of ‘Het Parool’.

What is a writers’ hotel without writers? A pen without ink? For a period of six months in 2021, one author a week was invited to stay at the Ambassade Hotel and describe their writing lives at that time. Throughout the period May to November 2021, the newspaper Het Parool published the Writers’ Hotel columns in its weekly Arts Section.

Read more about this column project in collaboration with ‘Het Parool’ .

Would you like to stay at the writers’ hotel as well? Enjoy a unique experience in the Ambassade Hotel with these special offer packages or come and admire the library after visiting Brasserie Ambassade.

Roxane van Iperen (b.1976) is an author and jurist.
She debuted in 2016 with Scum of the Earth (Hebban
Debut Prize), followed by The High Nest in 2018
(published internationally as The Sisters of Auschwitz),
which has already sold more than 200,000 copies.
In 2021, Van Iperen wrote the Book Week essay
The Genocide Fax, and delivered the 4 May reading.
In 2021, she published Letters to the High Nest.

Sixteen-Year-Olds

The most beautiful child in the world was born sixteen years ago in Amsterdam. It was the month of September, and the city was showing itself off in its Sunday best, in anticipation of her arrival. The nervousness of the summer had evaporated, but a blanket of warmth remained. Instagram didn’t exist yet, otherwise countless photos and films would have travelled around the world of canals rippling in rosegold light and cyclists in shirt-sleeves.

With my bottom in the grass and my gaze turned inwards, I shared my impatience with the trees in the Sarphatipark. Each day they changed colour like a lava lamp as we counted down together, ready to let go. On the second Tuesday of the month, when the newspapers wrote that rich and poor countries were quarrelling over the abolition of trade-distorting agricultural subsidies, and eBay paid a sum of 2.6 billion dollars for the acquisition of Skype, the most beautiful child in the world was born in a delivery room in the VU Hospital on De Boelelaan 1117. All of my boyfriend’s colleagues, who worked in the gynaecology department, came out to admire her. My knees were still up beside my ears, but they meant well, and I realised that decorum was the least
I had to lose from now on.

The most beautiful child in the world has turned sixteen and is walking along the canal with her friends on a lovely autumn day. It is always warm on her birthday, although you should never trust eye-witnesses. I sit on the terrace of the Ambassade Hotel, on the other side of the canal, and stare at them as they go. Bony bodies like foals, and childlike motor skills, which I know they will adjust in the shop windows between the Wolvenstraat and the Berenstraat, with inhibited self-consciousness. In the basement of the vintage store, Episode, they will rummage through the racks, apparently bored, and then spend their salaries on something that’s been lying neglected in my closet since 1998.

In the evening, we sit on her bed and watch an episode of Sex Education, in which a class of teenagers with weltschmerz are travelling to France on a school bus to the strains of La ballade des gens
heureux. A teacher is trying to encourage a boy who’s just been given a bad fail. ‘Everyone is good at something; you just have to find out what.’ ‘I’m good at imitating Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings,’ he answers. The awareness dawns on him that what adults have been telling him all this time is an illusion: that everything is possible and the world is waiting for him.

I look at my daughter in her third-hand sweater, which she wears with the allure of a film star, and I know one thing for sure. As long as I’m the world, it will be true.

View the column on the website of ‘Het Parool’.

What is a writers’ hotel without writers? A pen without ink? For a period of six months in 2021, one author a week was invited to stay at the Ambassade Hotel and describe their writing lives at that time. Throughout the period May to November 2021, the newspaper Het Parool published the Writers’ Hotel columns in its weekly Arts Section.

Read more about this column project in collaboration with ‘Het Parool’ .

Would you like to stay at the writers’ hotel as well? Enjoy a unique experience in the Ambassade Hotel with these special offer packages or come and admire the library after visiting Brasserie Ambassade.

Ronald Giphart (b.1965) debuted in 1992 with the
novel I Do Too, an instant classic in Dutch literature.
Giphart received the C.C.S. Crone Prize in 2004 for
his oeuvre. In 2021, his novella Applause: Love in the
Time of Corona was published, intended as an ode
to the care and support of local bookshops.

The Chelsea

Until 2011, the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan was the illustrious meeting point for hundreds of artists, actors and musicians. Madonna lived there (Room 822), Leonard Cohen (424) and Janis Joplin (411). Sid Vicious’s girlfriend was stabbed to death there (100), and The Sex Pistols’ bassist himself died of an overdose (also in 100).

Artists such as Christo, Robert Mapplethorpe (1017), Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol paid for their stays with works of art, paintings that were hung all over the hotel.

Numerous writers bivouacked there: from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, from William S. Burroughs to Jan Cremer (who lived there for quite some time), from Arthur Miller to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Room 205). When the latter returned one evening in 1953 from The White Horse Tavern, his nearby local, he died from the eighteen straight whiskies that he’d just drunk.

It was a pilgrimage to Dylan Thomas that brought my friend Dylan van Eijkeren (known from the newspaper Het Parool) and me to the Hotel Chelsea in the mid-90s. We were actually able to book room 205, at least that’s the story we told everybody later (in reality we stayed in room 434).

The Chelsea was everything I’d imagined it would be: the lobby was hung with works of art, the hotel was populated by a motley gathering of eccentric weirdos, and behind the tiny reception desk sat two men twenty-four hours a day in turbans, both named Singh.

In the aeroplane to JFK, Dylan and I had met two Dutch girls, and when we said goodbye at the airport, Dylan called out that we’d see each other at ten o’clock in The White Horse Tavern. This was before the mobile-phone age, so we had no idea whether the women would actually show up. They did, and ultimately Dylan and one of the girls would hook up.

The three of us ended up at the Chelsea. But as I didn’t feel like lying in my queen-sized bed listening to the playful exchange of genetic material in the bed next to me, I decided to take a nap in the lobby with the Singhs, lying on one of the old couches that Jimi Hendrix had once sat on (there are even photos of it). I asked the receptionists if I could rent an extra room, but sadly the hotel was fully booked that night.

After I’d explained my awkward predicament, they glanced at each other and sympathetically shook their turbans. One of the Singhs stuck his hand into a drawer and gave me a key to an unappealing little staff room with a bed on the twelfth floor. Later, I’d often claim that Mark Twain had once stayed there, but that probably wouldn’t be true.

View the column on the website of ‘Het Parool’.

What is a writers’ hotel without writers? A pen without ink? For a period of six months in 2021, one author a week was invited to stay at the Ambassade Hotel and describe their writing lives at that time. Throughout the period May to November 2021, the newspaper Het Parool published the Writers’ Hotel columns in its weekly Arts Section.

Read more about this column project in collaboration with ‘Het Parool’.

Would you like to stay at the writers’ hotel as well? Enjoy a unique experience in the Ambassade Hotel with these special offer packages or come and admire the library after visiting our sunny terrace on the Herengracht!

Pieter Waterdrinker (b.1961) is a journalist and
author of great, panoramic novels such as Lenin’s
Balsam, Poubelle and the successful The Long Song
of Tchaikovsky
Street. His latest novel The Rat of Amsterdam has been widely lauded.
His work hasbeen translated into English, German and Russian.

Hotel Children

I grew up in a hotel. Are there any other hotel children in our national letters? There are certainly enough hotel people. With Arnon Grunberg as Joseph Roth’s ultimate standard-bearer. Although Roth was born in a house in Ukraine, he wrote, drank, and lived in hotels until his death. What is a ‘hotel person’? Ultimately, and I don’t mean this unkindly, it’s someone who allows themselves to be served.

Hotels, like seaside resorts, are places where people feel slightly detached, adrift from normal life, which is frequently a mess. Materially, existentially, erotically. Spaces to be filled in various ways. Fine material for novelists! We worked in the service industry in the small hotel, café, restaurant, reception room, and mostly ‘work-house’ that my grandfather began after the war. My three uncles, Jacob, Benno, and Simon Waterdrinker. And my father, who after years as a cook’s mate in the merchant navy to South America, got his own ‘fire’, or stove.

Hotel Zomerlust in Zandvoort. It no longer exists. Those were strange years. The years in which I grew up. One million… what am I saying? Six million wienerschnitzels, that’s what my father fried for German seaside visitors in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. In theory, that was for the Wehrmacht soldier, too, who shot him in the leg when he was a boy in the Haarlemmerhout, in the final year of the war.

At the age when young writers these days can already boast of a prize-winning oeuvre, I was still washing plates, and cooking and serving in Zandvoort. In the meantime, I am now someone who is served. Perhaps that’s the only real transformation in my life: from server to served. But you never get used to it. I still turn my head away in slight embarrassment when a glass of wine, a cup of soup or a plate of pasta is set down in front of me. I never leave a hotel room without making my bed first, even though I know the chambermaid will be coming along in a little while with clean sheets. It’s a tribute to my mother. One million… what am I saying? She’s changed six million sheets in her life. Many small business people at that time were labourers for themselves.

Meanwhile, I’ve been ‘offshore’ for thirty years. What is Holland to me now? Apart from the cemetery of those I’ve loved? A hotel room. ‘Show me your hotel room, and I’ll tell you what sort of writer you are!’ In Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Baku, Grozny, Tashkent, Odessa, Yalta and other places, I grew accustomed to the sumptuous luxury of hotels on my work trips. But once back in Holland, a gammy guest bed or a low-class hotel would be waiting for me. It took about seven novels before publishers, patrons and programme makers in the fatherland greeted me with a hospitality that is usually only reserved for foreign writers. And so, dear reader, I ended up at the Ambassade Hotel in Amsterdam. My home in the Netherlands. The only one. Reason enough to make the literary fire smoke, roar and crackle.

View the column on the website of ‘Het Parool’.

What is a writers’ hotel without writers? A pen without ink? For a period of six months in 2021, one author a week was invited to stay at the Ambassade Hotel and describe their writing lives at that time. Throughout the period May to November 2021, the newspaper Het Parool published the Writers’ Hotel columns in its weekly Arts Section.

Read more about this column project in collaboration with ‘Het Parool’.

Would you like to stay at the writers’ hotel as well? Enjoy a unique experience in the Ambassade Hotel with these special offer packages or come and admire the library after visiting our sunny terrace on the Herengracht!