Tonke Dragt

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Antonia Johanna "Tonke" Dragt was born November 12, 1930, in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), the eldest daughter of a Dutch insurance agent. During World War II she and her family were interned in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp Tjideng, where at age thirteen she co-wrote a novel with a friend on scraps of paper and toilet rolls under a pen name. After the war her family relocated to the Netherlands in 1949, and she later enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague to train as an art teacher. She worked as a primary-school drawing teacher, writing at night, and found that storytelling helped her manage large post-war baby-boom classrooms, an experience that inspired her protagonist in De zevensprong. Her breakthrough came with De brief voor de koning (The Letter for the King, 1962), which won the Dutch Children's Book of the Year award in 1963, sold more than a million copies, and was later named the best Dutch youth book of the twentieth century's second half. Dragt is credited with pioneering fantasy and science fiction in Dutch children's literature. She received the Staatsprijs voor kinder- en jeugdliteratuur in 1976, the highest Dutch-language youth literature honor, and the Griffel der Griffels in 2004. The Letter for the King was adapted into a 2008 film and a 2020 Netflix series. Dragt died in The Hague on July 12, 2024, at age 93.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Letter for the King (1962) · The Letter for the King Core Canon
• The Secrets of the Wild Wood (1965) · The Letter for the King Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 2 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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