The Dutch writer and sculptor Jan Wolkers was a formidable contributor to his country's postwar culture, admired by some and abhorred by others for his frank explorations of sex, death and emotional and social turmoil.

A political radical and firm believer in breaking taboos, he used his characters and his art to challenge what he saw as the complacency of a highly conservative society with its intense sense of moral rectitude. The quality of his writing carried his reputation well beyond the Netherlands, however, with his best-known novels such as Turkish Delight translated into many languages. In his later years, having moved to a more secluded life on the island of Texel, he concentrated on sculpture more than writing. His Auschwitz memorial, made out of broken mirrors, was an especially striking creation.

Wolkers was born in 1925 in the small western Dutch town of Oegstgeest, whose conservative atmosphere and highly religious tone set by his strict Calvinist father he later recalled in Memoirs of Youth - Back to Oegstgeest. Much of his later writing contained a kind of personal, iconoclastic reckoning with this religious inheritance. As the Dutch Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk put it, Wolkers was representative of a generation “that liberated itself from what was seen as a stifling environment”. Before becoming a novelist he studied painting at Leiden and sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art in Amsterdam in the early 1950s, and also lived in Paris.

His first success as a writer came with A Rose of Flesh (published in Britain in 1967 in a translation by John Scott). It portrayed 24 hours in the life of Daniel, who is physically and mentally wrecked by an ordeal that began with the death of his daughter in a terrible scalding accident ten years earlier. Through Daniel's reflections and memories, mixed up with other material such as extracts from newspaper reports, a powerful image of human despair is created - as when he describes the breakdown of his marriage after the accident: “We worked away at each other like acid on zinc, gnawing and eating at each other with words full of venom...there was no gesture I could make to comfort her, to break the icy murderous silence. It was as if my arms had become rusted onto my body.”

Some critics found the work altogether too bleak. But Wolkers used powerfully in this novel the juxtaposition of very different elements — the revolting and the beautiful, life and death. A description of lovemaking was interrupted with an account of cancer surgery. Reviewing the novel in The Times, Piers Paul Read wrote of its “very pertinent” theme of “how badly we have been prepared for the ordinary, animal cruelty of life”.

The novel that would really make Wolkers's reputation - and establish his notoriety in some sections of Dutch society - was Turks Fruit (1969), translated into English as Turkish Delight (1974), in which a sculptor reflects bitterly and tenderly on the all-consuming love he once had but then lost, under pressure from a hostile society. It ends as he brings his former lover Turkish delight — the only food she will eat as she lies dying of cancer in hospital.

There were familiar themes here from Wolkers's work - acute description of emotion, atmosphere, sight and smell, passion followed by despair at decay and death, black humour aimed at various pillars of the Establishment. An artist in the novel speaks of selling his canvases to “newly wed intellectuals, in those modern flats in the suburbs. Because they were very effective sound-proofing”.

The book's explicit sexual descriptions attracted much attention, and led to the book being criticised by church leaders and banned from some schools. But it was highly popular with Dutch readers, reprinted many times, and made into an internationally admired film in the 1970s directed by Paul Verhoeven.

As well as novels Wolkers produced plays, short stories and essays. In his later writing he became more overtly political, critical of the colonial mentality still prominent in Dutch society, as well as apartheid in South Africa and the war in Vietnam. He condemned the European Economic Community as a capitalist plot that led to Dutch orchards being torn up because apples in Italy were cheaper. When he was awarded a leading Dutch literary prize he returned it in protest at violent police action against demonstrations marking the marriage of Queen Beatrix.

Moving in the 1980s to the Frisian island of Texel, Wolkers wrote less and spent more time back with the sculpture he had studied as a young man. He made a number of sculptures for outdoor display. His most famous public work, a memorial to the victims on Auschwitz commissioned for the city of Amsterdam, consists of a series of large broken mirrors in which the sky is reflected, day and night. “After Auschwitz”, as Wolkers put it, “the sky is wounded for ever.”

He was married three times, most recently to Karina Gnirrep.

Jan Wolkers, sculptor and writer, was born on October 26, 1925. He died on October 19, 2007, aged 81