The Most Famous

WRITERS from South Africa

This page contains a list of the greatest South African Writers. The pantheon dataset contains 7,302 Writers, 22 of which were born in South Africa. This makes South Africa the birth place of the 49th most number of Writers behind Israel, and Lithuania.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary South African Writers of all time. This list of famous South African Writers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of South African Writers.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

With an HPI of 87.63, J. R. R. Tolkien is the most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 152 different languages on wikipedia.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ROOL TOL-keen; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the tremendous success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ignited a profound interest in the fantasy genre and ultimately precipitated an avalanche of new fantasy books and authors. As a result, he has been popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature and is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time.

2. J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940)

With an HPI of 69.76, J. M. Coetzee is the 2nd most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 93 different languages.

John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG (born 9 February 1940) is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates. Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is patron of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. His most recently published book is The Pole and Other Stories (2023).

3. Nadine Gordimer (1923 - 2014)

With an HPI of 68.01, Nadine Gordimer is the 3rd most famous South African Writer. Her biography has been translated into 103 different languages.

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity". Gordimer was one of the most honored female writers of her generation. She received the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, and the Central News Agency Literary Award for The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter and July's People. Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.

4. Peter Abrahams (1919 - 2017)

With an HPI of 57.26, Peter Abrahams is the 4th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 41 different languages.

Peter Henry Abrahams Deras (3 March 1919 – 18 January 2017), commonly known as Peter Abrahams, was a South African-born novelist, journalist and political commentator who in 1956 settled in Jamaica, where he lived for the rest of his life. His death at the age of 97 is considered to have been murder.

5. André Brink (1935 - 2015)

With an HPI of 56.40, André Brink is the 5th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 36 different languages.

André Philippus Brink (29 May 1935 – 6 February 2015) was a South African novelist, essayist and poet. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town. In the 1960s Brink, Ingrid Jonker, Etienne Leroux and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the significant Afrikaans dissident intellectual and literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers"). These writers sought to expose the Afrikaner people to world literature, to use the Afrikaans language to speak out against the extreme Afrikaner nationalist and white supremacist National Party-controlled government, and also to introduce literary modernism, postmodernist literature, magic realism and other global trends into Afrikaans literature. While André Brink's early novels were especially concerned with his own opposition to apartheid, his later work engaged the new questions of life in South Africa since the end of National Party rule in 1994.

6. Ronald Harwood (1934 - 2020)

With an HPI of 53.41, Ronald Harwood is the 6th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 25 different languages.

Sir Ronald Harwood (né Horwitz; 9 November 1934 – 8 September 2020) was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

7. Laurence Oliphant (1829 - 1888)

With an HPI of 51.64, Laurence Oliphant is the 7th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Laurence Oliphant (3 August 1829 – 23 December 1888), a Member of Parliament, was a South African-born British author, traveller, diplomat, British intelligence agent, Christian mystic, and Christian Zionist. His best known book in his lifetime was a satirical novel, Piccadilly (1870). More heed has gone since to his plan for Jewish farming communities in the Holy Land, The Land of Gilead. Oliphant was a UK Member of Parliament for Stirling Burghs.

8. Laurens van der Post (1906 - 1996)

With an HPI of 50.58, Laurens van der Post is the 8th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, (13 December 1906 – 15 December 1996) was a South African Afrikaner writer, farmer, soldier, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist. He was noted for his interest in Jungianism and the Kalahari Bushmen, his experiences during World War II, as well as his relationships with notable figures such as King Charles III and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. After his death, there was controversy over claims that he had exaggerated many aspects of his life, as well as his sexual abuse and impregnation of a 14-year-old girl.

9. Breyten Breytenbach (b. 1939)

With an HPI of 49.41, Breyten Breytenbach is the 9th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 27 different languages.

Breyten Breytenbach (Afrikaans pronunciation: [brɛɪtən brɛɪtənbaχ]; born 16 September 1939) is a South African writer, poet, and painter who became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. Breytenbach is now informally considered by Afrikaans-speakers as their poet laureate and is one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature. He also holds French citizenship. Breyten Breytenbach was born in Bonnievale, approximately 180 km from Cape Town and 100 km from the southernmost tip of Africa at Cape Agulhas. His early education was at Hoërskool Hugenote and he later studied fine arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He is the brother of Jan Breytenbach, co-founder of the 1st Reconnaissance Commando of the South African Special Forces against whom he holds strongly opposing political views, and the late Cloete Breytenbach, a widely published war correspondent. His committed political dissent against the ruling National Party and its white supremacist policy of apartheid compelled him to leave South Africa for Paris, France, in the early 1960s, where he married a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry, Yolande, as a result of which he was not allowed to return. The then applicable Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and Immorality Act (1950) made it a criminal offence for a person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race. He is the father of the French journalist Daphnee Breytenbach. On an illegal trip to South Africa in 1975, he was arrested and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for high treason. His work The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist describes aspects of his imprisonment. According to André Brink, Breytenbach was retried in June 1977 on new and fanciful charges that, among other things, he had planned a submarine attack by the Soviet Navy on the prison at Robben Island through the conspiratorial "Okhela Organisation." In the end, the judge found him guilty only of having smuggled letters and poems out of jail for which he was fined $50. During his imprisonment, Breytenbach wrote the poem "Ballade van ontroue bemindes" ("Ballade of Unfaithful Lovers"). Inspired by François Villon's "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis", Breytenbach compared Afrikaner dissidents Peter Blum, Ingrid Jonker, and himself to unfaithful lovers, who had betrayed Afrikaans poetry by taking leave of it. Released in 1982 as a result of international protests, Breytenbach returned to Paris and obtained French citizenship. After free elections toppled the ruling National Party and ended apartheid in 1994, Breytenbach became a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town in the Graduate School of Humanities in January 2000 and is also involved with the Gorée Institute in Dakar (Senegal) and with New York University, where he teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program. Breytenbach's work includes numerous volumes of novels, poetry and essays, many of which are in Afrikaans. Many have been translated from Afrikaans to English, and many were originally published in English. He is also known for his works of pictorial arts. Exhibitions of his paintings and prints have been shown in cities around the world, including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh and New York City. Laureate of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award 2017 Ansfield-Wolf Book Award Allen Paton Award for Literature Mahmoud Darwish Award for Creativity Breytenbach is the only exception mentioned by name in the satirical Apartheid-era Spitting Image song "I've Never Met a Nice South African". The Basque rock band Berri Txarrak dedicated the song "Breyten" to him on their 2005 album Jaio.Musika.Hil. Sestigers Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award A Conversation with South African Poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist Breyten Breytenbach on His Own Imprisonment, South Africa’s "Failed Revolution," Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama An Hour with the Renowned South African Poet, Writer, Painter and Anti-Apartheid Activist Breyten Breytenbach Podcast Interview with Breytenbach by André Naffis-Sahely Review of Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish by André Naffis-Sahely Stellenbosch Writers Breyten Breytenbach, Professor of Creative Writing Open letter to General Ariel Sharon (by Breyten Breytenbach) http://www.goreeinstitut.org/ Poetry Podcast at Badilisha Poetry Exchange Culture.pl interview from May 2017 after winning the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award

10. Deon Meyer (b. 1958)

With an HPI of 49.10, Deon Meyer is the 10th most famous South African Writer. His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Deon Godfrey Meyer is a South African thriller novelist, writing primarily in Afrikaans. His works have been translated into 28 languages. He has also written numerous scripts for television and film.

People

Pantheon has 25 people classified as South African writers born between 1828 and 1980. Of these 25, 8 (32.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living South African writers include J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and Deon Meyer. The most famous deceased South African writers include J. R. R. Tolkien, Nadine Gordimer, and Peter Abrahams. As of April 2024, 4 new South African writers have been added to Pantheon including Andrew Murray, Es'kia Mphahlele, and Gcina Mhlophe.