ABOUT THE AUTHORS
MARLENE VAN NIEKERK is an award-winning poet, novelist, and short story writer. Her novel Triomf (translated by Leon de Kock) was a New York Times Notable Book, 2004, and won the Central News Agency Literary Award, the M-Net Prize in South Africa, and the prestigious Noma Award, the first Afrikaans novel to do so. Agaat received the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the Hertzog Prize. Van Niekerk is currently an associate professor in Afrikaans and Dutch literature and creative writing at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
MICHIEL HEYNS’s novels include The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, and The Typewriter’s Tale. He has translated two works by Marlene van Niekerk, Memorandum and Agaat, for which he received the English Academy’s Sol Plaatje Award for Translation. He also translated Equatoria by Tom Dreyer (Aflame Books UK, 2008). His latest novel, Bodies Politic, was recently published by Jonathan Ball.