Breyten Breytenbach is one of the major postwar poets writing in Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, South Africans of Dutch descent. He gained an international reputation with the publication of his first long work written in English, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984), an autobiographical novel based on the seven years he spent imprisoned for activities against the apartheid regime.

Breytenbach was born 16 September 1939 in Bonnievale, Western Cape; he grew up there and in surrounding towns in a wheat- and wine-growing region often nostalgically associated with his parents, Johannes Stephanus (Oubaas) and Catherna Johanna Cloete (Ounooi), and the magical world of his childhood in his various writings. The most elaborate evocation of this milieu is in his Dog Heart: A Travel Memoir (1998). Although from an Afrikaner family, he studied literature at the English-language University of Cape Town and art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art...