The Love Song of André P Brink is the first biography of this major South African novelist who, during his lifetime, was published in over 30 languages and ranked with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Carey and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Leon de Kock's eagerly awaited account of Brink's life is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner's hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was 54 years in the making. In this massive new biographical source – running to a million words – Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with a great number of women. These are precisely the topics that the rebel in both politics and sex skated over in his memoir, A Fork in the Road. De Kock's biographical study of the author who came close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature not only synthesises the journals but also subjects them to searching critical analysis. In addition, the biographer measures the journals against additional sources, both scholarly and otherwise, among them the testimony of Brink's friends, family, wives and lovers. The Love Song of André P Brink subjects Brink's literary legacy to a bracing scholarly re-evaluation, making this major new biography a crucial addition to scholarship on Brink.

This book appraises André Brink’s reputation as an internationally acclaimed commentator on the enormities of the apartheid state and one of South Africa’s foremost novelists. Highlighting Brink’s enduring meditation on the writer’s responsibility to a society in a state of moral and political siege and his exemplary position in the interrogation of the subtle discursive strategies of the apartheid establishment, it refers extensively to Brink’s oeuvre, but focuses mainly on his first seven novels in English: The Ambassadors, Looking on Darkness, An Instant in the Wind, Rumours of Rain, A Dry White Season, A Chain of Voices and The Wall of the Plague. Aimed primarily at students of South Africa, it draws on postcolonial theory to examine the ideological implications of the Western aesthetic and intellectual background that nurtured Brink’s imagination, his fixation with the tragic vision, Christian theology, and existentialism, in the context of his professed political affiliations.

"Andre Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty, he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts of his world - between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn't bargained for." "While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer. At the same time, the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. This resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police, in censorship, and in fractured relationships with many people close to him. Equally it led to extraordinary friendships sealed by meetings with leaders of the ANC in exile in both Africa and Europe." "Andre Brink tells the story of a life lived in tumultuous times. His long love affair with music, art, the theatre, literature and sport illuminates this memoir as do relationships with remarkable women, among them the poet Ingrid Jonker, who have shared and shaped his life, and encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Beyers Naude, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Above all, A Fork in the Road is a love song to the country where he was born, and where, despite its recent troubles and tragedies, he still lives." --Book Jacket.

Love and Fury traces a woman's fierce love and righteous rage, unravelling entanglements that are at once tender and traumatic. Renowned South African crime writer Margie Orford offers candid revelations, both political and personal, which have shaped her life and influenced her writing. Surviving marriage, divorce, depression, personal loss and sexual assault, Orford recounts memories of what she has experienced as a woman, a wife, a mother – and particularly as a writer. Love and Fury demonstrates the enduring, debilitating effects of hurt and harm, but at the same time it exemplifies the power of love, self-belief and self-reflection, ultimately offering a message of hope. This book is for every person who has experienced passion and wrath – and who looks beyond this to the light. 'This book kept me alive.'

André Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between a meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn t bargained for. While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer. At the same time the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. This resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police, in censorship, and in fractured relationships with many people close to him. Equally it led to extraordinary friendships sealed by meetings with leaders of the ANC in exile in both Africa and Europe. André Brink tells the story of a life lived in tumultuous times. His long love affair with music, art, the theatre, literature and sport illuminate this memoir as do relationships with remarkable women, among them the poet Ingrid Jonker, who have shared and shaped his life, and encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, Beyers Naudé, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Above all, A Fork in the Road is a love song to the country where he was born, and where, despite its recent troubles and tragedies, he still lives.

This book reflects on the "literary" in literature. Less ideologically construed, more affirmative of literary attachment, the study adopts a style of intimacy – its "tough love" – in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. Instead of configuring literary works to "state-of-the-nation" issues – the usual approach to literature from South Africa – the chapters keep alive a space for conversation, whether accented inwards to locality or outwards to the Anglophone world: the world to which literature in South Africa continues to belong, albeit as a "problem child". A postcolony that is not quite a postcolony, South Africa is richly but frustratingly textured between Africa and the West, or the South and the North. Its literature – hovering on the cusp of its locality and its global reach – raises peculiar questions of reader reception, epistemological and aesthetic frame, and archival use. Are the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee local writers or global writers? Is the novel or the short story the more appropriate form at the edges of metropolitan cultures? Given language, race, and culture contestation, how do we recover Bushman expression for contemporary use? How to consider the aesthetic appeal of two contemporaneous works, one in English the other in isiXhosa, the one indebted to Bloomsbury modernism the other to African custom? How does Douglas Livingstone attach the Third World to the First World in both science and poetry? What has a "born free" novelist, Kopano Matlwa, got to do with the Bard of Avon? In a time of theorisation, is it permissible for Lewis Nkosi to embody literary criticism in an autobiographical journey? How to read the rupturing event – the statue of Rhodes must fall – through a literary sensibility? Alert to the influence of critique, the study is equally alert to the "limits of critique". Reflecting on several writers, works, and events that do not feature in current publications, On Literary Attachment in South Africa releases literature to speak to us today, within the contours of its originating energy.