André Brink, the influential campaigning South African novelist and playwright, has died. The writer was travelling back from Amsterdam to South Africa on Friday when he became fatally ill during the flight.
The 79-year-old author, perhaps best known for his 1979 novel A Dry White Season, which focuses on the death in detention of a black activist and was adapted for film in 1989, was a literature professor at the University of Cape Town and had just been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.
A member of the literary movement known as Die Sestigers (the 1960s generation) alongside Breyten Breytenbach and poet Ingrid Jonker, Brink wrote in both Afrikaans and English.
He was born in 1935 in Vrede, a small town in the Free State and became famous for using Afrikaans to speak against apartheid. His novel Looking on Darkness, was banned by the apartheid government in 1974. His other works include Devil’s Valley, Before I Forget and Praying Mantis. The books An Instant in the Wind and Rumours of Rain were both shortlisted for the Booker prize.
After circulation of copies of Rumours of Rain was held up for six months by the South African authorities in 1978, Brink reverted to private distribution for A Dry White Season.
“We had a subscription list of those who had bought the earlier books,” he said the following year. “We sold about 4,000 copies that way.” After several months the censors gave approval to the book, also lifting a ban on Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, and it was released through formal publication channels.
Ten years later, Brando left retirement on Tahiti to take a small part in the film of A Dry White Season, which starred Donald Sutherland, Zakes Mokae and Susan Sarandon, and was banned in South Africa
In 2012, Brink was again long-listed for the Man Booker prize for his slavery novel Philida.
