André Brink

Brink studied in South Africa and Paris, and returned home from a formative stay in France in the early 1960s determined to write Afrikaans literature that confronted apartheid rather than served it, a stance that put him at odds with the Afrikaner literary and political establishment his language belonged to. His 1973 novel Looking on Darkness became the first Afrikaans book banned by the South African government, a status A Dry White Season and other later works repeated.

A Dry White Season, published in 1979, followed a politically naive white teacher radicalized after a Black colleague dies in police custody, translated by Brink himself into English to reach the wider audience Afrikaans censorship denied him at home. He taught literature for decades at South African universities, kept writing and translating across both languages through apartheid's end, and died in 2015 aboard a flight returning from an honorary degree ceremony in Belgium.