Mapmakers: Writing In A State Of Siege

Brink, Andre. Writing in a State of Siege. London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1983. 13.5 cm x 21 cm. 256 pages. Original Softcover. Very good condition with minor signs of external wear. Clean inside with solid binding. Includes the following A Background to Dissidence / The Position of the Afrikaans Writer / Writers and Writing in the World / Mahatma Gandhi Today / On Culture and Apartheid / English and the Afrikaans Writer / Literature and Offence / After Soweto / Of Slaves and Masters / Mapmakers / The Writer in a State of Siege / The Intellectual and His World / Writing Against Silence / The Freedom to Publish / Imaging the Real / The Languages of Culture / Censorship and Literature. André Brink was born on May 29, 1935, in Vrede, South Africa. He studied English and Afrikaans at the University in Potchefstroom and comparative literature in Paris. He was a South African writer and educator. He became a part of a group of writers known as Die Sestigers upon returning to South Africa in the 1960s. The group aimed to broaden Afrikaner fiction by writing about sexual and moral matters and the failings of the traditional political system. His books included Rumors of Rain, Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season, and States of Emergency. Some of his books were banned in South Africa. He became a professor of Afrikaans and Dutch literature at Rhodes University and professor of English at the University of Cape Town. He has received the 1980 Martin Luther King Prize, the 1980 French Prix Medicis Etranger, and the 1982 Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice and nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature on several occasions. He died on February 6, 2015, at the age of 79. (Google Books) In Mapmakers Andre Brink addresses himself to the question of his own place in a society whose predicament is amongst the most explosive of the late twentieth century.