About the author
About the Author — Artuur Nobel Van Lebergh
Artuur Nobel Van Lebergh is the pen name of a Flemish-born author living in Amsterdam. His first encounters with BDSM came in the early 1990s, in saunas of Brussels and Antwerp. And at a legendary leather bar called The Boots, where he first found a community that understood what he needed.
A Life Shaped by Experience
In 1994, he answered an advertisement in a fetish magazine from a dominant in Amsterdam. Ten years later, that man became his husband. For five years, they owned the Black Tulip Hotel in Amsterdam — a gay hotel with a reputation that reached far beyond the Netherlands. During those years he met players, masters, and fellow masochists from around the world, many of whom shaped the journey that eventually led to this book.
Artuur is not a typical slave or submissive. What drew him to BDSM was never protocol or service, but pain itself — learning to meet it, shape it, and transform it into something that taught him about his own body and his own limits. Over three decades he has trained extensively in the physical and mental disciplines required to receive intense scenes, and he has been recognised within the scene as what one admirer called "fetish royalty."
Beyond the expected narrative
Arthur’s story is not about roles or labels.
It is about understanding pain, trust, and the limits of connection.
The Reason Behind the Book
The Untold Birthday Speech is his debut novel. He wrote it for one reason: to understand what had happened to him. Over the last three years, he had built something with a dominant in Berlin that neither of them could name — more than play, not quite a relationship, too deep to dismiss and too complicated to explain. When it ended abruptly, without a reason he would ever be given, he was left with three years of memories, one speech that had never been delivered, and a need to make sense of it all.
He began writing. The result is this book — a novel based on real events, addressed directly to the man who walked away.