Henri van Wermeskerken

Henri van Wermeskerken was a Dutch journalist and writer, who mostly wrote novels for the general public, but also some plays and short stories. The collection Langs den gordel van smaragd (Along the Emerald Belt) from 1923 is considered his best work. As a journalist he was a correspondent for the Associated Press, Haarlem Dagblad, and the Soerabajasch Dagblad. Already in 1906 he wrote reports in letters from the Olympic Games in Athens. He was the son of Sophia Margaretha Cornelia Junius (1853-1904), one of the first successful women in the Dutch literary scene, who wrote under the pseudonym Johanna van Woude. De Oceaan-vlucht, a “modern play of air and oceans in four acts”, premiered in 1931. The play was also published in the same year as a novel titled Het Manneneiland (The Men’s Island). Three shipwrecked men stranded on a tropical island before World War I 18 years later are “visited” by three modern women in the 1930s.