South African Novelist Andre Brink Dies

André Brink (Photo: theguardian.co.uk)

The publishers of one of South Africa's most prolific authors have confirmed that novelist André Brink has died. The South African Press Association reported on Saturday that Brink died aboard a flight travelling from the Netherlands to the city of Cape Town Friday evening. He was 79 years old.

NB publishers says Brink was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature several times. It says Brink was twice shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker prize. In 2012, he was again long listed for the Man Booker Prize for the novel "Philida."

Media report that Brink was part of a group of authors who used the Afrikaans language to oppose the apartheid regime, which banned some of his books.

Brink, who wrote in English and Afrikaans, published his first novel in 1962.

Brink’s debut novel, Lobola vir die lewe, was published in 1962. He, Ingrid Jonker and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in Die Sestigers, a literary movement in the 1960s that sought to use Afrikaans to speak against the apartheid government. Kennis van die aand, which came out in 1973, became the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the apartheid government.

In 1976 An Instant in the Wind was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 1978 Rumours of Rain was a runner-up for the Booker Prize. In 1978 Brink won the CNA Literary Award for Rumours of Rain, and in 1980 he was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize (England) and the Prix Médicis Etranger (France) for A Dry White Season. In 1982 he won another CNA Literary Award for A Chain of Voices.

Brink’s awards are too numerous to list, but other highlights include the 1982 Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur: Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (France), the Monismanien Award for Human Rights (Sweden, 1992), the Hertzog Prize, twice (2000 and 2001), the 2003 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) for The Other Side of Silence and the 2006 M-Net Literary Award for Praying Mantis.

In 2006 Brink was awarded The Order of Ikhamanga (silver) as well as a Literary Lifetime Achievement Award from the Department of Arts and Culture. The Medaille Grand Vermeil De La Ville Award, the highest decoration of the city of Paris, was bestowed on Brink in 2013. The Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) named Brink as the winner of the 2014 ACT Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature last year.

Brink was one of South Africa’s most versatile literary figures, a novelist, dramatist, travel writer, translator, critic and academic, and his books have been translated in more than 30 languages. His most recent novel was Philida.