The Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) named author André P. Brink as the 2014 winner of the ACT Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Born in Vrede in 1935, André P. Brink is the author of numerous plays, works of non-fiction, and novels, including An Instant in the Wind, Rumours of Rain, A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire, The Other Side of Silence and most recently, Philida, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012. He became the first Afrikaans writer to have a novel, Kennis van die Aand, banned by the apartheid censors in 1973.
Since then, he writes simultaneously in Afrikaans and English. He has also translated over seventy books from French, German, Spanish and English into Afrikaans as well as from Afrikaans into English. He has won the CNA Award three times, the Hertzog Prize twice, and was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Brink is the recipient of the Prix Médicis Étranger, Premio Mondello, Monismanien Human Rights Award, the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and the Sunday Times Fiction Award, University of Johannesburg Prize, and Commonwealth Literature Prize for Africa Region. In 2005, he was made Officier of the Legion of Honour by the French government. His memoir A Fork in the Road was published in 2009. His work has been translated into 36 languages.
Brink is currently a Professor Emeritus of the University of Cape Town.
The 2014 ACT Awards ceremony is sponsored by Nedbank Arts Affinity, hosted by Sun International and presented in association with the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), Media24 Books, ClassicFeel Magazine and is supported by the Distell Foundation and Business and Arts South Africa (BASA).
Other Lifetime Achievement Award Winners include Richard Cock for Music, Sam Nzima for Visual Art, Richard Loring for Theatre and Mandie van der Spuy for Arts Advocacy. Each Lifetime Achievement Award winner receives R30 000 as a cash prize.
Please click here for more information about the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT).
The Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) is South Africa’s premier independent arts funding and development agency. The primary aim of ACT is to increase the amount of funding available for arts and culture initiatives, and to apply these funds to innovative, sustainable projects that make a meaningful contribution to society. Through structured funding programmes, ACT provides support for all expressions of arts and culture, including literature, music, visual art, theatre and dance, and the support extends to festivals, community arts initiatives, arts management, arts education and arts administration. To receive updates follow ACT on Twitter at or like the Trust’s Facebook page.
Media24 Books is a division of Media24 and forms part of the Naspers group of companies. It comprises the trade publishers NB Publishers and Jonathan Ball Publishers, the schools publishing group Via Afrika Education, the higher education publisher Van Schaik Publishers and the book club business Leserskring/Leisure Books.