Jack Higgins
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Stan Lauryssens (born 1946) is a Belgian writer. He lives in Antwerp and London.
As a journalist in the 1970s and 1980s, Lauryssens travelled the world and interviewed Jack Higgins Harold Robbins, Catherine Cookson, Konsalik, Thor Heyerdahl, Charles de Gaulle and Andy Warhol. He had prolonged meetings with Hitler’s henchmen: Karl Dönitz, Sir Oswald Mosley, Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Eichmann’s family, and Otto Günsche and has written five books about the Nazis.
Lauryssens wrote the book Dalí and I about his experiences with the surrealist painter. Room 9 Entertainment in Hollywood bought film rights. Academy Award nominee Andrew Niccol rewrote the screenplay and will direct the film, entitled Dali & I: The Surreal Story. Lauryssens will be played by Cillian Murphy, with Al Pacino as Dalí.
His non-fiction books were serialised in The Mail on Sunday and are published in English, French, Italian and Polish and have gained cult status in Japan. His first thriller, Black Snow, won him the Hercule Poirot Award 2002 for best crime fiction of the year, and was followed by Dead Corpses (2003) and Red Roses (2004), Deader Than Dead Too (2005), More than Naked (2005), No Time for Tears (2006)and "The Sooner You Die". Translation rights for "Dalí & I: The Surreal Story" have been sold in some 30 languages. The book is also out as an Amazon Kindle Edition and on CD, from Tantor Media.
Lauryssens is currently working on a memoir tentatively titled A Curry at Night and Sex on Sunday. This story will recount his seven years as an outcast in an Indian family in the London suburbs that ended with him living for a couple of days in "cardboard city" under Waterloo Bridge.
