André van Loon

I write about political marketing, advertising theories, creative insight generation and Artificial Intelligence.

I am fascinated by how political parties and personalities use social & digital media. I think it's an area of real creativity and fresh thinking about how to inform and persuade voters — and a space in which the centuries-old gulf between leaders and citizens has been reduced radically.

Electioneering, digital storytelling and social media positioning are my main topics of interest.

I also write articles and essays about advertising theories, in particular the marketing effectiveness debate. Much advertising misses its mark, or impacts in unintended ways, making it all the more interesting to describe its success when it does work. How did it work? Why now and not before? Why for these people and not for others? What, exactly, happened?

These questions, answered properly, quickly go beyond mere data and analytics — to potentially encapsulate socio-cultural, political, historical, psychological, neurological and a host of other human contexts and factors.

I am also interested in futurology and Artificial Intelligence. In many ways, it's strange enough that people have cognitive and affective faculties, but the development of non-human knowledge systems is stranger still.

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You can read more here.

« D’abord, j’ouvre le livre en grand et je colle mon nez au milieu des pages pour les respirer. »

- Clémentine Mélois

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I find reading books to be a magical experience, at its best. It's a pleasure I can't quite explain ("the most healing of pleasures", according to Harold Bloom)... but to try to account for it would probably be to miss the point.

What I do like to do is to consider books, to think them through, say what they do well or otherwise — to journey with the author and to give my impressions of her or him afterwards, in literary criticism.

I tend to write about new novels, especially English and American fiction; Russian history, culture and literature (the Russian 19th century in particular; in so many ways a fantastical, frightening and transcendent time); politics, poetry and philosophy.

I come back again and again to literary novels and poetry; and especially books about and from England, America, France and Russia.

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You can find a selection of my literary reviews here.

It was Ernest Hemingway who made me want to write my own stories. A difficult personality, Hemingway can also write like an angel. 'Now I Lay Me', 'Cat in the Rain', 'Hills Like White Elephants' are wonderfully simple and compelling, and beautifully stylised.

I write vignettes and short stories, and I am at work on a novel.

My stories are often about families and relationships... mothers, fathers; sisters, brothers; love... and about quiet personalities suddenly placed in impossible situations, that to others appear to be fine; 'what's the problem'?

And there's often a quest for something like the truth, a realisation, a new way of looking at the world.

I would say my writing sensibility mixes Hemingway with Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, W. B. Yeats, Jay McInerney and Josephine Hart.

You can read my published stories here.

I write poetry sparingly... And yet, when I have written and cut, re-written and tried again, to come finally at a series of words I feel say something true and simply, it is the best writerly feeling.

I wrote my first poetry for the school magazine in Breda, aged 12, about Love & Hate — and have since then gone on to write that poem over and over again, in different words and different styles, different places and times, always coming back to that first expression.

But I have also written about other things, taking Inspiration as my guide: travelling, the 2020 lockdown and experience, confusion and clarity.

I hope to write much more poetry. In the meantime, you can read what I have done here.