Amsterdam

MARIA MAGANA A2

• Amsterdam is the capital city of and the most populous within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Its status as the Dutch capital is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands though it is not the seat of the Dutch government, which is at The Hague (Den Haag). Amsterdam has a population of 810,084 within the city-proper, 1,569,300 in the urban region and 2,3 million in the greater metropolitan area.The city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country. It comprises much of the northern part of the  Randstad, one of the larger conurbations in Europe, with a population of approximately 7 million.

• Amsterdam's name derives from Amstelredamme, indicative of the city's origin as a dam of the river Amstel. Originating as a small fishing village in the late 12th century, Amsterdam became one of the most important ports in the world during the Dutch Golden Age, a result of its innovative developments in trade. During that time, the city was the leading center for finance and diamonds.In the 19th and 20th centuries,the city expanded, and many new neighborhoods and suburbs were planned and built. The 17th-century canals of Amsterdam and the 19–20th century Defence Line of Amsterdam are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Harry Mulisch

• Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch (29 July 1927 – 30 October 2010) was a Dutch writer. He wrote more than 80 novels, plays, essays, poems and philosophical reflections. These have been translated into more than 30 languages.

• Along with Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve, Mulisch is considered one of the "Great Three" of Dutch postwar literature. His novel The Assault became a 1986 film, which won both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. A 2007 poll revealed his 1992 novel The Discovery of Heaven as the "Best Dutch Book Ever". He was regularly thought of as a possible future Nobel laureate.

• Mulisch was associated with accessories such as his spectacles and pipe.

WORK• Mulisch gained international recognition with

the film The Assault (1986), which was based on his book The Assault (1982). It received an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign movie and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

• His novel The Discovery of Heaven (1992) is considered his masterpiece, it was voted “the best Dutch-language book ever” by Dutch readers in a 2007 newspaper poll.“It is the book that shaped our generation; it made us love, even obsess, with reading,” said Peter-Paul Spanjaard, 32, a lawyer in Amsterdam at the time of Mulisch's death.It was filmed in 2001 as The Discovery of Heaven by Jeroen Krabbé, starring Stephen Fry.

• Among the many awards he received for individual works and his total body of work, the most important is the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (Prize of Dutch Literature, a lifetime achievement award) in 1995.