- In 1974 he resigned as a teacher and became chief editor of Turnhout Ekspres, and since 1979 he is a member of the editorial team of the Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift.
- In 1965, he founded the magazine Heibel with Frans Depeuter and Robin Hannelore.
- He graduated as a teacher in Dutch and History (Lier), and he started his career as a teacher.
- In 2010 he wrote the script for a comic book by Reinhart.
- He became well known through his play Groenten uit Balen and the novel Brief aan Boudewijn, which was succeeded by the tetralogy Het beleg van Laken.
- He was an honorary citizen of Olen and his hometown of Turnhout.
- He was a Belgian writer and playwright.
- He received in 1992 the "Belgische Staatsprijs voor Vlaams" verhalend proza.
- His play ( De tuinman van de koning) "The Gardener of the King", became well known in Flanders through the masterful interpretation by actor Luc Philips.
- He showed his commitment and social involvement throughout his life, including for the survival of the newspaper De Morgen or the fate of fellow writer and journalist Roger Van de Velde in captivity.
- His latest novel, 'The Difficult Love' ( De lastige liefde) (2023), completed his tumultuous family history.
- Transitioning from teaching to full-time writing and editing, Walter van den Broeck's career flourished. Walter van den Broeck's acclaimed play "Groenten uit Balen" and the novel "Brief aan Boudewijn" garnered widespread acclaim, establishing him as a leading voice in Belgian literature.
- What Macondo was for Gabriel García Márquez, the town Olen (in Flanders) is for Walter van den Broeck. Since 'Letter to Boudewijn' (1980), many of his novels are set in that village.
- Admirer and author Jeroen Brouwers called him in Vlaamse Leeuwen " Flemish Lions" (1994) a "literary Tijl Uilenspiegel", who mixed his commitment with "the mocking tone of his ironic, always inviting snickers", "a joker who is at the same time engaged in a one-man guerrilla - with all the misunderstandings that entails." It is no coincidence that Van den Broeck published his own Uilenspiegel adaptation in September 2022.
- His big breakthrough came in 1980 with the novel Letter to Baudouin, in which he fictionally gave the then Belgian King Baudouin a tour of his own house, life and surroundings, thus giving the king a picture of Flanders and more specifically of the Kempen from below.
- Walter van den Broeck wrote dozens of novels. He made his breakthrough with "Letter to Boudewijn" in 1980. In which he - again - interwove his own childhood stories into a fictional story. The novel reads like a letter to the then Belgian king. The novel was also sent to the royal family, but a meeting with King Baudouin never took place.
- Van den Broeck was for many years one of the most popular novel and theater authors in Flanders and received two State Prizes.
- Walter van den Broeck transferred his entire archive to the Letterenhuis in Antwerp in 2022, exactly 50 years after the first performance of "Groenten uit Balen" by the Brussels Chamber Theater in the Volkshuis in Balen. According to the Letterenhuis, Walter van den Broeck's archive is one of the most complete author archives of his generation of writers. It offers an overview of all his works and provides insight into the writer's working process. It includes documentation, but also draft versions, improved versions and correspondence.
- In 2023, at the age of 82, De lastige liefde ("The Difficult Love") was published by Vrijdag Publishers. It became his 30th and very last book. I twas a book about his elder brother.
- His work uses autobiographical elements to tell a counterhistory that is at odds with the official history of major events, which is often based on abstract data and analyses. In contrast, Van den Broeck tells the concrete, everyday history as experienced by 'the common man' and thereby creates an original, socially involved image of contemporary Flanders in an accessible, sometimes folksy and comic style.
- Van den Broeck taught that as an important writer you did not have to live in big Flemish towns as Antwerp, Ghent or Brussels.
- After a number of autobiographical novels, he became known in 1972 with the committed play Groenten uit Balen, inspired by a real-life strike and its consequences in the Kempen municipality of Balen.
- Van den Broeck wrote about child abuse in the church in "The Alphabet of Silence" (2013) "Het alfabet van de stilte ".
- Writing was like eating, drinking and breathing for the author of Brief aan Boudewijn (Letter to Boudewijn 1980). Without his pen he was even "fairly enjoyable." He once said about himself.
- The banking crisis is discussed in the profound novel Back to Walden (2009). Social concerns continued to fuel his theater work and novels. Through their sharp criticism they ask for a reader who does not simply consume passively, while the texts never become intellectualistic.
- His classic and filmed play Groenten uit Balen (1972) focuses on a working-class family during a strike that actually took place in 1971 in the Balen zinc factory of Vieille-Montagne. The mentality of resistance is also present in his other social realist plays. In " De rekening van het kind" (The Account of the Child) (1973), a Dutch teacher denounces the suffocating pressure of the school system.
- He has never betrayed his working-class roots in his prose and theater work, just like his Kempen (Campine) birthplace. Not without taking them to a more universal level.
- He self-published his debut : De Troonopvolger "The Heir to the Throne", in 1967.
- He was also a member of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature.
- He was the son of a German mother and a father with Flemish and Spanish-Mexican-Filipino roots.
- His social and family reality seeps through in his many novels, stories, plays, TV scripts and radio plays, although never unambiguously or navel-gazing. The folk narrators of his novels fit into a Flemish storytelling tradition à la Gerard Walschap and they appear in cleverly constructed, polyphonic stories.
- The fact that Van den Broeck grew up in an environment of workers provided the basis for his writing. After studying at the National Normal School, preparing for a career in education, he managed to escape his environment. He worked as a teacher for a while and then became editor-in-chief of the advertising magazine Turnhout-Ekspres for many years.
- Born with a passion for storytelling, Walter van den Broeck embarked on a journey that would leave a mark on Belgian culture.
- The Campine (De Kempen) were a particularly fertile ground for Walter van den Broeck's stories. He was born in Olen on March 28, 1941, where he says he started writing when he was 8.
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