André Brink

1935 - 2015

photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

movement: Sestigers

country of citizenship: South Africa

languages spoken, written or signed: English, Afrikaans

educated at: North-West University

occupation: linguist, writer, translator, university teacher, literary scholar, literary scholar

award received: Knight of the Legion of Honour, Officer of Arts and Letters, Order of Ikhamanga, Reina Prinsen Geerligs prize, Monismanien Prize, Prix Médicis étranger, honorary doctor of the University of the Witwatersrand, honorary doctor of the Catholic University of Louvain, honorary doctor of the University of Pretoria, honorary doctor of the University of the Free State

André Philippus Brink (29 May 1935 – 6 February 2015) was a South African novelist, essayist and poet. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town.In the 1960s Brink, Ingrid Jonker, Etienne Leroux and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the significant Afrikaans dissident intellectual and literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers"). These writers sought to expose the Afrikaner people to world literature, to use the Afrikaans language to speak out against the extreme Afrikaner nationalist and white supremacist National Party-controlled government, and also to introduce literary modernism, postmodernist literature, magic realism and other global trends into Afrikaans literature. While André Brink's early novels were especially concerned with his own opposition to apartheid, his later work engaged the new questions of life in South Africa since the end of National Party rule in 1994. Source: Wikipedia (en)