Podcast with South Africa’s Great Homme des Lettres, André Brink
André Brink is one of the world’s major writers – and has been so for several decades. He is best-known as a novelist, but has also distinguished himself as a lecturer, poet and essayist. An homme des lettres of the kind that are far and few between in South Africa, his fascination with language can be felt in all his writings.
Brink’s books, such as An Instant in the Wind, A Dry White Season, Rumours of Rain and The Other side of Silence, established his ability to tackle head-on Africa’s “big” subjects in in fiction, colonialism, Apartheid, and a rapidly changing world. Join me on the Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast and hear Brink share how he developed as a writer, what led to his discovery of the power of language and how the distance supplied by 1960s Paris helped him to see very clearly the dark evil that was Apartheid. (Some of this is also set down in his latest work, A Fork in the Road, which records his memoirs.)
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