David Van Reybrouck has been described as ‘one of the leading intellectuals in Europe’ (Der Tagesspiegel) and ‘one of the most brilliant European intellectuals of the moment’ (Le Soir).
He is the author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, which won twenty prizes, sold over half a million copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. Van Reybrouck’s essay Against Elections: The Case for Democracy was translated into over twenty languages and drew praise from former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. As well as a literary non-fiction writer, Van Reybrouck is an acclaimed playwright and poet. His plays Mission and Para have toured internationally, and his poetry has culminated into Rain Requiem, a tribute to climate victims. Van Reybrouck’s novel Zinc won the European Book Prize 2017 and Revolusi was a major bestseller.
A pioneering advocate of deliberative democracy, Van Reybrouck founded the G1000, a platform for democratic innovation and inclusive participatory politics. Van Reybrouck has also been actively involved in organising literary workshops for Congolese playwrights in Kinshasa and Goma. Apart from Dutch, his mother tongue, he is fluent in French and English, has a working knowledge of Spanish and Afrikaans, and can communicate in German and Lingala.
Van Reybrouck studied archaeology and philosophy at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and obtained a Master’s degree in World Archaeology from the University of Cambridge. Van Reybrouck received an honorary doctorate from the University of Saint Louis in Brussels and also holds a doctorate from Leiden University. In 2021 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities of Bard College, New York. As of 2024, David Van Reybrouck has been appointed as the Arne Næss Professor at the University of Oslo.
