Writer and broadcaster Adriaan van Dis was awarded this year’s prestigious Libris literature prize at a ceremony in the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam on Monday evening.

He won the €50,000 prize and bronze medal for his book Ik kom terug (I’ll be back), a memoir in which a 98-year-old mother offers to tell her writer son her life story in exchange for him giving her the pills which will ensure she dies peacefully.

The jury, led by Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes, called the book ‘an exceptional novel, which lays bare what it means to be human in a tragi-comic way’.