The hugely versatile and constantly challenging Belgian author and artist Hugo Claus’s life came to an end with a characteristic act of defiance and great self-assurance. He made use of Belgium’s liberal laws on euthanasia, according to his friends and family, with a moment of calm and dignity, “choosing the exact moment of his death”.

Claus had been stricken by the onset of Alzheimer’s, and the loss of facility with words had been especially hard to bear for one whose career had ranged with great verbal dexterity and imagination across fiction, poetry, the theatre and translation as well as film and art. His reputation was formidable not only in Belgium but in the rest of Europe and beyond, especially following the publication and translation into many languages of his 1980s novel The Sorrow of Belgium. He was nominated many times for the Nobel prize for literature. And his poetry had a strong international following too, with the writer and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee praising work which had a “verbal concentration, intensity of feeling and intellectual range” that brought Claus into “the first rank of European poets of the late 20th century”. He also achieved fame of a very different kind when his then wife, the actress Sylvia Kristel, starred in the globally successful erotic film Emmanuelle.

Although his reputation spread so far, Claus’s literary work was rooted in the Flemish society in which he grew up in the deeply troubling period surrounding the Second World War. He was born the eldest of four sons

of a printer in 1929 in Bruges but

did not have a happy childhood. Relations with his family were difficult — he later described his family as

“suffocating” — and his work would be coloured by a dislike of authoritarian father figures, as well as an acute ear for the tensions and hypocrisies of bourgeois domestic life. Nor did he find the strict Catholic boarding schools to which he was sent a congenial environment. He ended up, as one critic termed it, a “visceral nonconformist”.

Although he received a good educational grounding, on which he would draw later, he left school aged 16 and soon moved to Paris, earning a living working in a sugar factory (which he later portrayed in a play) while frequenting artistic and literary circles. Before long he had published his first volume of verse. As a painter and sculptor he associated himself with the CoBrA group of Abstract Expressionists based in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, which emphasised the spontaneous and dynamic rather than a more formalist approach.

His horizons were further widened by travel to Italy and the US, and his interest in the English-speaking world was reflected in his translation of writers as varied as Shakespeare, John Donne and Dylan Thomas.

However, Claus’s focus returned constantly to his Belgian origins. He was aware that Belgium, so much mocked by outsiders, was not the most fashionable of subjects, but claimed this helped his writing as he was never restrained by any sense of grandeur. Within Belgium itself, he was determined to use his art to challenge the cosy consensus and denial of suffering which he had observed in the societies in which he had grown up.

“I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand”, he once said. “Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.” In political terms he was on the left, visiting Cuba approvingly in the 1960s. But he was as much, if not more, concerned with social rather than political issues and taboos. As well as sexually explicit verse, he wrote of repressed homosexuality. And in his 1970 play Friday, also staged in London, he portrayed the consequences of incest and adultery.

His use of nudity on stage and relationship with Kristel gave Claus a much broader fame — or notoriety — than in purely cultural circles. Claus had encouraged Kristel to apply for the role of Emmanuelle, and accompanied her to filming in Thailand. But he grew weary of the attention she attracted following the film’s fame, and their marriage, which had produced a son, Arthur, came to an end.

Claus’s international literary reputation was secured by the publication in 1983 of The Sorrow of Belgium. Its inspiration was strongly autobiographical but the coming of age of the novel’s leading character, Louis Seynaeve, and the relationships of others were interwoven in a loose, impressionistic style with reflection on how Flemish society had responded to the temptations of Nazi ideology and the confusion of identities that the war had intensified so disturbingly. Claus was not simply a hostile observer from outside — he knew from his youth how appealing the fascist Flemish youth movement had been, how far collaboration and compromise had seeped into his society. The novel followed the story into the postwar period of recrimination and guilty silence. Admiring critics compared the novel in its daring form, scope and historical subject matter with Günter Grass’s German equivalent, The Tin Drum.

Claus’s later work also engaged with another potent aspect of his country’s unresolved past — the brutal Belgian colonial adventure. In The Rumours, a deserter who has fought in the Belgian Congo returns to his Flanders home in the 1960s and prompts all kinds of disruption in a kind of village epidemic of gruesome death. Along the way Claus relished the portrayal of characters such as an alcoholic village priest and an over-amorous postman, though he was capable, too, of writing with compassion with those he saw as caught up in events or bewildered by what life could bring. A later novel, Unfinished Past, highlighted the continuing trauma of those most directly involved in colonial shame.

The Belgium in Claus’s writings displayed deep fractures as well as dark secrets. However, he resisted the easy lure of the political nationalisms or sub-nationalisms that so plagued his native country, past and present. He publicly opposed recent proposals to split the country into its Francophone and Dutch-speaking parts. Following his death, the outgoing Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said of Claus: “With every text and poem, he was an emotional beacon in our dark world”.

Claus is survived by his wife, Veerle De Wit, and by a son from his marriage to Kristel.

Hugo Claus, writer and artist, was born on April 5, 1929. He died on March 19, 2008, aged 78