Geert R. A. Kliphuis

Geert Richt Alexander Kliphuis is an author, songwriter and guitarist, born in the Netherlands in 1955, and currently living in Brussels, Belgium.
His father was the art therapist Maks Kliphuis (1923-2015), as a teacher one of the driving forces behind Middeloo, the social-pedagogic training centre for therapists in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, and later head of the department of creative process therapy at the Jelgersma Kliniek of Leiden University. Kliphuis's mother, who died in 1964, was Nel van der Velde, a drama teacher, radio presenter and author of children's books, and poetry and fiction for adults. (Het Kleinere Werk and Het Grotere Werk were published posthumously in 2008/2009 by the Erven Nel Kliphuis-Van der Velde.)
Working as a street-musician in Brussels, the former West-Berlin, Barcelona, Hamburg, London and Paris during the 1970s and 1980s, Kliphuis wrote an extensive series of short travel stories for NRC Handelsblad. He applied the same format for his songs: concise observations with a tragicomical undercurrent. The Belgian band Vaya Con Dios recorded his ' , to great critical acclaim, and ' . Using the pseudonym Jay Conrad, Kliphuis recorded a twenty-odd songs on two albums, A Penniless Gentleman (1994, BMG) and Steeltown Girls (1997, Arcade).
In all, Kliphuis has written close to 70 songs, all registered at SABAM. These days he writes novels, such as The Mirror City , and publishes Zeitgeist Letters , a non-profit online magazine about medieval Arabic science and philosophy.

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