Biography

Van Heerden was born in 1954, six years after the official advent of apartheid. His mother was an English speaking mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 teacher. His father, an Afrikaans

Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...

 speaking merino

Merino

The Merino is an economically influential breed of sheep prized for its wool. Merinos are regarded as having some of the finest and softest wool of any sheep...

 stud breeder, farmed the family farm in the Karoo

Karoo

The Karoo is a semi-desert region of South Africa. It has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south. The 'High' Karoo is one of the distinct physiographic provinces of the larger South African Platform division.-Great Karoo:The Great Karoo has an area of...

. Van Heerden was reared Afrikaans, with English reserved for use at home on Tuesdays, and learned from comics ordered from London.

Due to being born blind in the right eye, he was not called up for combat duty, but served as a dog handler, playing his alsatian

German Shepherd Dog

The German Shepherd Dog , also known as an Alsatian or just the German Shepherd, is a breed of large-sized dog that originated in Germany. The German Shepherd is a relatively new breed of dog, with its origin dating to 1899. As part of the Herding Group, the German Shepherd is a working dog...

 at major festivals.

Van Heerden initially studied law, and was admitted to the South African Side Bar as attorney. He freelanced as deputy sheriff for the Civil Court, and moved about in the townships around Cape Town, dispensing civil summonses and learning a great deal about life in these suppressed communities. As a young practitioner, his clients were mostly from the black and coloured crime-ridden communities around Cape Town.

Van Heerden also lectured Legal Practice at the Peninsula Technikon and spent two years in advertising. At age thirty, with the birth of his eldest daughter, Van Heerden left the routine of a budding Cape Town advertising agency. He and his family relocated to northern Natal

Natal Province

Natal, meaning "Christmas" in Portuguese, was a province of South Africa from 1910 until 1994. Its capital was Pietermaritzburg. The Natal Province included the bantustan of KwaZulu...

 where he started out on his academic career in Literature at the University of Zululand

University of Zululand

The University of Zululand has been designated to serve as the only comprehensive tertiary educational institution north of the uThukela River in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Its new status is in accordance with South Africa's National Plan for Higher Education aimed at eradicating inequity and...

. His PhD was a study on engagement and postmodernism.

During the eighties he was member of a group of Afrikaans writers secretly meeting the banned ANC of Mandela and exiled writers at the (now famous) Victoria Falls Writers’ Conference, held in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...

.

Van Heerden is seen as member of a generation of Afrikaans artists who contributed significantly to opening up the Afrikaner psyche to change.

He regularly teaches at universities in Europe, and has been Writer in Residence at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He was a member of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program

International Writing Program

The International Writing Program is a writing residency for international artists in Iowa City, Iowa. Since its inception in 1967, the IWP has hosted over 1,100 emerging and established poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists, and journalists from more than 120 countries...

 in 1990, and has been back on visits to this university, of which he is an Honorary Fellow in Writing. He regularly reads his fiction at events such as the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the Winter Nights Festival in the Hague, Netherlands, the Time of the Writer Festival in Berlin, Germany, the Zimbabwe Book Fair and other festivals and events internationally.

Despite at times at odds with the apartheid government, van Heerden never left South Africa permanently, and now teaches at the University of Cape Town, where he is the Hofmeyr Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures, and chairs the Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies Section. His current activities at the University of Cape Town include the supervision of Creative Writing, where he has led a generation of young Afrikaans authors to published status, and the lecturing of courses in Literary Theory, Media Studies, and South African and Dutch Literature.

Van Heerden is married to Kaia, a practising doctor, and lives in Stellenbosch. The couple has two daughters, Imke and Menán.

Although he lives in the Western Cape, Van Heerden returns, in his writing, to the Karoo of his childhood. He describes this arid and mythological part of South Africa’s deep interior is his own “landscape of the mind”.

He serves on the board of directors of NB Publishers, which includes, amongst others, Kwela, Tafelberg, Best Books and Human and Rousseau publishers.

Works

Van Heerden has published two books of poetry, two books of short stories, a collection of cabaret songs, theoretical and academic work, and novels. His activity spans a wide range — a syndicated columnist in the major three Afrikaans dailies, published countrywide in South Africa, his own program on satellite television, and founder-editorship of one of the few South African internet startups.

Books

• Matoli (1978)
• My Cuban (1983)
• Om te AWOL (1984)
• Liegfabriek (1988)
• Toorberg (English: Ancestral Voices) (1986, 1989)
• Casspirs en Camparis (English: Casspirs and Camparis) (1991)
• Die Stoetmeester (English: Leap Year) (1993, 1997)
• Kikoejoe (English: Kikuyu) (1996)
• Die Swye van Mario Salviati (English: The Long Silence of Mario Salviati) (2000, 2003)
• In stede van die liefde (2005)
• Asbesmiddag (2007)
• 30 Nagte in Amsterdam (2008)

External links

• Etienne van Heerden's homepage