Cornelis (Cees) van Zweeden is a writer of historical fiction whose first novel, Drina, was published in 2023 to rave reviews.

He started his career as a journalist and worked in thirty countries, witnessing major historical events. He travelled among the soul-destroying ruins of war-torn Lebanon, covered a vicious Algerian civil war, interviewed the pony-tailed man who almost murdered Serbia’s leader Slobodan Milošević, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the tenacious Tunisians who toppled dictator Ben Ali.

His travels left him with a passion for history but also with the conviction that behind big events lie small stories about ordinary people who are propelled into stardom or sent into oblivion. Often, these tales illustrate the destructive power of history better than a thousand history books.

One such extraordinary story is that of Drina, a Gypsy girl who escaped from a Bulgarian slum to become a spy in communist Yugoslavia. The historical novel puts a magnifying glass on a nightmare from which the region still tries to wake up: Goli Otok. The book is set in Southeast Europe, Provence and England.

Born in the Netherlands, he moved to London at the age of 37 to become a foreign correspondent for a large group of newspapers. After that, he was dispatched to Paris and Budapest. He covered the Maghreb traveling from Paris and the Balkan peninsula from his base in Budapest.

In Macedonia he dodged bullets, and near Berane in Montenegro he escaped from an ambush. When he stopped for a coffee in an isolated road-side café in Sutjeska National Park, he bumped into the Bosnian Serb warlord Radovan Karadžić, who had been in hiding for ten years.

He also developed a love for nature, climbing mountains and kayaking trough the magnificent Tara canyon, the world’s second deepest. In an attempt to find a place never visited by tourists, he trekked for weeks through the Indonesian jungle, only to bump into a group of jolly Germans. 

When his last assignment as a foreign correspondent came to an end, he started to read law and reinvented himself as a media lawyer. As such, he worked for international organizations in Kosovo, Ukraine, Albania, Morocco and Serbia.

He holds a Master’s degree in International Intellectual Property Law from the University of London.