Andr� Brink is a South African writer and educator. He was born on May 29, 1935 in Vrede, South Africa. Brink studied at Potchefstroom in South Africa and later in Paris. Brink became a part of a group of writers known as the Sixtiers 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. Two of Brink's books, Looking on Darkness and A Dry White Season, were banned in South Africa. Brink 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. Brink has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice and nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature on several occasions.
J.M. Coetzee's full name is John Michael Coetzee. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, Coetzee is a writer and critic who uses the political situation in his homeland as a backdrop for many of his novels. Coetzee published his first work of fiction, Dusklands, in 1974. Another book, Boyhood, loosely chronicles an unhappy time in Coetzee's childhood when his family moved from Cape Town to the more remote and unenlightened city of Worcester. Other Coetzee novels are In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians. Coetzee's critical works include White Writing and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Coetzee is a two-time recipient of the Booker Prize and in 2003, he won the… Nobel Literature Award.