Born in Rembrandt’s university city of Leiden in the Netherlands, his parents emigrated to Canada, where, by design, Slegtenhorst has worked in its largest cities—Ottawa, Montréal, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver—and many of the country’s smaller communities, in nine of the ten Canadian provinces. He has also worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa. He resides in the West End of Vancouver, Canada.
Hendrik Slegtenhorst has written and published fourteen books and over 140 works in established media.
His interests are music, literature, and the arts; the natural environment and the urban landscape; and, the realization of community identity, aspirations, and needs. His work experience extends across:
- his activities as a professional writer, speaker, columnist, and editor;
- board directorships in cultural, community, and economic development;
- executive management of local government and heritage institutions;
- senior management of post-secondary education; and,
- corporate appointments in project management, information technology, human resources, compensation, and training at transnationals.
Long-term artistic projects and research have included:
- Lifelong and university study of English, with a particular interest in poetry.
- Lifelong and formal study of music, including performance on the clarinet, and with particular interests in opera, the symphony, and the string quartet.
- All the fiction and prose of Maugham, from 1965 onwards.
- All of Bergman’s films, from 1968 onwards.
- All the novels of Hesse, from 1970 onwards.
- All of Shakespeare, especially from 1992 onwards.
- All of Bach’s cantatas, especially from 1997 onwards.
- All of Haydn’s symphonies, especially from 1999 onwards.
- Studies in world history, especially from 2000 onwards.
- Professional studies in international trade, from 2002 onwards, with receipt of the HSBC Award of Excellence and professional designation as a Certified International Trade Professional (CITP), both in 2003.
- All of Dickens’s novels and prose books, especially from 2004 onwards.
- Professional studies in Canadian local government, at the University of Alberta and later at Dalhousie University, Halifax, from 2006 onwards, leading to professional designations in local authority administration.
- All of Shostakovich’s symphonies, especially from 2008 onwards.
- All of Shostakovich’s string quartets, especially from 2011 onwards.
- All of Beethoven’s string quartets, especially from 2012 onwards.
- All of Wagner’s operas, especially from 2014 onwards.
- All of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, especially from 2014 onwards.
- Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, from 2016 onwards.
- All of Kurosawa’s films, especially from 2017 onwards.
- All of Verdi’s operas, especially from 2018 onwards.
- All of Tarkovsky’s films, from 2018 onwards.
Other special interests include:
- In music: Bruckner’s symphonies.
- In music: All Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler.
- In music: Operas by Strauss.
- In painting: Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and van Gogh.
- In cinema: Lang, Ray, Ford, Huston, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kobayashi, and Ichikawa.
- In poetry: Milton, Rilke, Eliot, Faludy, Miłosz, and Melançon.