Tonke Dragt was born in the Dutch East Indies and spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp with her mother and sisters during World War II, where she drew on the walls and, with a friend, “erased notebooks” and started writing, “because there was nothing to read”. “We wrote regarding very tasty food and very wide distances, regarding things we didn’t have behind barbed wire,” Tonke Dragt said.
After the war she moved with her family to the Netherlands. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. Originally she became a drawing teacher, but to keep the children focused, she told them stories.
These stories formed the basis of her later youth novels. ‘Towering High and Miles Wide’ (1969), ‘The Towers of February’ (1973) and ‘Secrets of the Wild Forest’ (1965) are eversellers.
