André Philippus Brink

André Philippus Brink (born May 29, 1935, Vrede, South Africa—died February 6, 2015, in an airplane traveling from the Netherlands to South Africa) was a South African writer whose novels, which he wrote in Afrikaans and English versions, often criticized the South African government.

Brink was educated in South Africa and France. He later became professor of Afrikaans and Dutch literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), South Africa. He was one of a new generation of Afrikaans writers known as Die Sestigers (“the Sixtyers,” or writers of the 1960s), whose declared aim was “to broaden the rather too parochial limits of Afrikaner fiction.” In essence, this meant depicting sexual and moral matters and examining the political system in a way that rapidly antagonized the traditional Afrikaner reader.

Brink’s early novels Lobola vir die lewe (1962; “The Price of Living”) and Die ambassadeur (1963; The Ambassador) were essentially apolitical, but his later work presented increasingly bleak and bitter evidence of the disintegration of human values that occurs under apartheid. Kennis van die aand (1973; Looking on Darkness), ’N oomblik in die wind (1975; An Instant in the Wind), and Gerugte van reën (1978; Rumours of Rain) used the sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman to show the destructiveness of racial hatred. Brink was perhaps best known outside his homeland for the antiapartheid novel ’N droë wit seisoen (1979; A Dry White Season; film 1989), in which a white liberal investigates the death of a black activist in police custody. His later works include Houd-den-bek (1982; A Chain of Voices), which recounts through many points of view a slave revolt in 1825; Die kreef raak gewoond daaraan (1991; An Act of Terror); Anderkant die stilte (2002; The Other Side of Silence); Bidsprinkaan (2005; Praying Mantis); and Philida (2012). He also wrote plays and travel books and translated foreign literature into Afrikaans. Brink’s memoir, A Fork in the Road (2009), is a meditation on the evolution of his political consciousness and his decreasing faith in the government of his country.

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