Marlene van Niekerk
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Award-winning poet, novelist and short story writer. She was awarded South Africa’s high honour, the Order of Ikhamanga, in 2011 for her outstanding intellectual contribution to literary arts and culture field through poetry, literature and philosophical works. She is a Professor in Afrikaans and Dutch literature and Creative Writing, Stellenbosch University and held the Unesco Africa Chair in Utrecht in 2007/8.
The film adaptation of her debut novel TRIOMF, directed by Michael Raeburn, won the Best South African Film Award at the Durban International Film Festival, 2008.
KAAR, a collection of poetry, was published in Afrikaans (untranslated) in 2013 and won three national prizes (The Herzog prize, the Elisabeth Eybers Prize and the University of Johannesburg prize).
AGAAT is translated by Michiel Heyns, who won the Sol Plaatje Award for translation for this work. This extraordinary novel has received the following accolades in its Afrikaans and English editions:
- Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 2008.
- Winner of the South African Sunday Times Literary Prize 2007 and the Hertzog Prize 2007, SA.
- University of Johannesburg Prize, M-Net Award, W.A. Hofmeyr Award, all 2005.
- Shortlisted Booksellers' Choice Award South Africa 2005 and the M-Net Literary Prize 2007.
- #1 on Swedish Bestsellers List for five weeks in 2012.
- Chosen as Book of the Month by Good Housekeeping.
-Shortlisted for Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award, sponsored by Amazon.com, 2011.
- Longlisted for the Independent Booksellers Choice Award 2011
- It has also been listed in Publishers Weekly’s Top 100 Best Books of 2010 and picked as one of Booklist Editor’s Choice List for 2010.
THE SNOW SLEEPER
Short Stories, 192 pages, Human & Rousseau, February 2019
How do stories begin, and why? What are the conditions for writing fiction? Need, compulsion, a listener, opportunity, rhetoric …
In THE SNOW SLEEPER, the art and meaning of storytelling is illuminated in four magically interwoven tales of friendship. In each, a narrator's narrow vision is gradually broadened and transformed into piercing self-knowledge. The characters are linked each to the other in strange, recurring loops, drawing the reader into the depths of a beautiful snowstorm.
AGAAT
Literary fiction, 695 pages
Little, Brown & Co Ltd - November 1, 2007
1950s South Africa. Milla, condemned to silence by a creeping paralysis, struggles to communicate with her maidservant and now nurse, Agaat.
'Narrative creation of the highest order.' -- Patrick Denman Flanery, Times Literary Supplement
MEMORANDUM
Novella, 199pp
SA: Human & Rousseau 2006, both English and Afrikaans, translated by Michiel Heyns; Holland: Querido 2007.
Honourable Mention, SA Sunday Times Prize 2007
A moving and original novella set in a hospital. Inspired and accompanied by paintings by the late South African realist artist, Adriaan van Zyl.
TRIOMF
Literary fiction, 528 pages
Little, Brown & Co Ltd - September 1999
This is the story of the four inhabitants of the poor white suburb of Triomf. Their freehold township razed to the ground as a so-called 'black spot', they await with trepidation their country's first democratic elections.
‘A tempestuous, heartbreaking, exhilarating read.’ -- Elisabeth Vincentelli, Time Out New York