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 (translated by Ina Rilke), Nomad’s Hotel (translated by Ann Kelland), The Foxes Come at Night (translated by Ina Rilke) and Lost Paradise (translated by Susan Massotty) 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.

In the opening of his great novel, All Souls’ Day (translated by Susan Massotty), a film-maker, Arthur Daane, observes that the Dutch word for history, geschiedenis, contains the suffix nis, a word that also means niche. A niche in history, he thinks, might be a place to keep things or to find them. In a Nooteboom book, history is inscribed everywhere: in love affairs, in the ageing body, in monuments, in conversation, in silence, in stone. The writing is wry, lucid, often comic and always attentive.

Nooteboom’s work holds an unusual and personal place in my life. More than 20 years ago, I arrived home from university to find a message on the answering machine. Listening, I understood that something terrible had happened. I tried to call my family but could not reach anyone. Frightened, I sat down and opened the book nearest to me, All Souls’ Day. I had only 20 pages left to read, and I hid inside these pages, reading slowly as if a book of fiction could keep the next hour, or even the next moment, at bay. When the phone rang again, I had six pages left. I got up to answer it. I was told that my mother had died. She had suffered heart failure a few hours earlier, in the night. She had been away on a work trip and by the time her colleagues found her, she was gone.

Soon after, I left Canada and lived for a time in the Netherlands before embarking on a life of movement. For years, I kept All Souls’ Day with me even though I had no intention of finishing it. It was a piece of the past that I carried. But 15 years later, I took it down from the shelf and found the place where I had stopped.

In the last pages of the novel, Nooteboom describes a cemetery where hundreds of women, accompanied by their children, are tending the graves of their loved ones. They are embracing one another. The graveyard floats free, gathering up the women and the children and the flowers. Untethered from the earth, it is a “dream world stretching out to the horizon” and a “ship of joy”. You never leave the dead entirely, Arthur thinks. Someone must bring the flowers, someone must mark the single day, 2 November, that is the possession of all souls.

Through his books, Nooteboom taught me how we might write about history and also hold ourselves accountable to the present. His voice bristles with passion, wit and melancholy. For most of his life, he returned repeatedly to Spain. In this country, which seemed to hold up a mirror to his deepest self, he wrote about the journeys that had marked him.

Among those travels was a journey to Iran in the spring of 1975. “The key word is old,” he writes. “You approach Persia with blind western arrogance and are confronted by thousands of years of history without any point of reference. The last thing you ever learned was Xerxes, but what about all those centuries that came afterwards?” In the city of Isfahan, attempting to describe a dome made of stone and earth yet somehow transparent, he almost gives up the task: “I cannot fathom it.” But then, restlessly moving, he enters a forest of stone pillars. “There is light everywhere,” he writes, “floating, pooling, piercing, threading; the very stones have been embroidered with it, pigeons fly in and out of it.” He says that even the most opulent dynasty might turn out to be “but a scratch on the great stone of history”. He writes about the shah, about political prisoners, about torture and grief, and what may yet come.

Who am I to be here? he often asks. In Nomad’s Hotel, he describes the traveller like this: “It’s a game, he knows it is both true and untrue, he is assembling falsehoods to make a plausible past. The game is called continuity, and contrary to what other people think he does not reject the contemporary world, but wishes to shore it up – memory and recognition being the tools.” But even this recognition might impede our sight, as when we move closer to examine a detail and the surrounding world dissolves. Our travels, Nooteboom observes, might require more than we know how to give: “To find what he is looking for he has acquired an extra forehead, covered in eyes.”

Perhaps all the Nooteboom works are about history’s niches, where much lies in wait or is lost for good. To learn to be a traveller, he wrote, is to know that one is both an absence and a presence.

Nooteboom, though lauded for decades, and often mentioned as a contender for the Nobel prize, never seems to have been widely read in English. Readers such as myself stumbled upon him by chance, or by good luck, when his works were pressed into our hands by Dutch and German friends. His novel came to me when I needed it most, and I have returned to it, and to all his books, as if to an ever-enlivening conversation. I feel as if I lost a friend. But Daane reminds himself at the end of All Souls’ Day: someone must bring the flowers. Here, then, are mine.

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, whose novels, travel writing and translations made him a prominent literary figure in postwar Europe, has died aged 92.

Publishing house De Bezige Bij said in a statement on Wednesday evening that Nooteboom had “passed away very peacefully on his beloved island Menorca”. The statement was made on behalf of the author’s wife, the photographer Simone Sassen.

“We will miss the friendship, erudition, enthusiasm and individuality of this internationally acclaimed writer,” it said.

Nooteboom first made a name for himself in the Netherlands with his 1955 debut novel Philip and the Others. Based on long hitchhiking trips to the Mediterranean and through Scandinavia, it won the Anne Frank prize and became a Dutch literary classic.

He achieved his international breakthrough with his 1980 novel Rituals, about two friends – one of whom breaks rules frequently while the other follows them strictly. The book was turned into a film in 1988 and became his first work to be published in English translation.

Born in The Hague on 31 July 1933, Nooteboom told the Guardian in a 2006 interview that he had no childhood memories until the outbreak of the second world war.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, “we watched on the horizon the glow of Rotterdam burning and I remember being very afraid and having to have cold water thrown in my face to calm me down”.

His father was later killed when a British air raid levelled a residential quarter of The Hague “by mistake”.

Germany was later one of the European countries were Nooteboom’s fiction and travel writing found even greater critical acclaim and commercial success than at home.

As well as writing his own work, Nooteboom translated works from English into Dutch, such as poetry by Ted Hughes and Czesław Miłosz, and the plays of Brendan Behan and Seán O’Casey.

He was awarded honorary doctorates from universities in Brussels, Nijmegen, Berlin and, in 2019, the University College London.