The great Dutch travel writer, who died this week, found history inscribed in every place he visited, all while remaining accountable to the present

• Cees Nooteboom, Dutch novelist and travel writer, dies aged 92

In the opening to his acclaimed travelogue Roads to Santiago, the Dutch author Cees Nooteboom writes that “there are some places in the world where one is mysteriously magnified on arrival or departure by the emotions of all those who have arrived and departed before”. Travellers have existed in every age, Nooteboom continues, but only for some does there exist a particular sorrow: that of the one who departs with no hope of return. For them, the voyage out becomes the life.

Nooteboom, who was born in the Netherlands in 1933 and died this week aged 92, was drawn to what could be grasped through the “prism of movement”. In a body of work that includes some 60 books of fiction, poetry, reportage and travel writing, of which only a dozen or so have been translated into English, he became a chronicler of departures. In The Following Story, Nomad’s Hotel, The Foxes Come at Night and Lost Paradise, Nooteboom, his characters and his subjects take to the road. They glimpse histories dissolving from memory and past cruelties rekindled, again and again, in ways that chill the heart. Nooteboom was 12 years old when his father was killed during the second world war; he has said that his first childhood memories are of the bombings and the destruction in their wake.