- Dramatist.
- This prolific wrote more than 60 plays, a hundred stories, a number of articles on art and folklore and more than 20,000 letters.
- His 1934 play La Balade du grand macabre served as inspiration for György Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre.
- He died in solitude in 1962, not knowing that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature.
- In 1939 he stopped writing plays because he felt misunderstood. Afterwards he wrote only prose.
- In his youth and later he had a fragile health. He got typhoid fever when he was 16.
- Among Ghelderode's influences were puppet theater, commedia dell'arte and the Belgian painter of the macabre, James Ensor. His works often deal with the extremes of human experience, from death and degradation to religious exaltation.
- He had Flemish parents but was brought up in French and wrote in French as his Flemish and French-speaking contemporaries whose work was rooted in the double Belgian culture: André Baillon, Georges Eekhoud, Max Elskamp, Franz Hellens, Fernand Crommelynck, Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, Charles Van Lerberghe and Émile Verhaeren.
- He is the creator of a fantastic and disturbing, often macabre, grotesque and cruel world filled with mannequins, puppets, devils, masks, skeletons, religious paraphernalia, and mysterious old women. His works create an eerie and unsettling atmosphere although they rarely contain anything explicitly scary.
- According to Oscar G. Brockett, the works of Ghelderode resemble those of Alfred Jarry, the surrealists and the expressionists, and his theories are similar to those of Antonin Artaud.
- Jean Cocteau proclaimed: "Ghelderode is the black diamond that closes the necklace of poets that Belgium carries around her neck. This black diamond casts a cruel and noble fire. It wounds only the small souled. It dazzles others.".
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