Maurice Maeterlinck Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian playwright and essayist who developed an international reputation in the late nineteenth century, culminating in being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. His plays were a key part of Symbolist theatre, a experimental theatre movement that spread across Europe, drawing in some of the great playwrights of the age. Strindberg declared, on reading Maeterlinck, ‘he struck me like a new country and a new age’. His influence can be felt on writers from Chekhov to Samuel Beckett and beyond. Read More Read Less