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8 May 2004 at Protea Boekhuis: Etienne talking to Herman Wasserman about Die stilte ná die boek

Hofmeyr Professor Afrikaans & Netherlandic Studies School of Languages University of Cape Town Rondebosch 7701 SOUTH AFRICA Tel SA + 21 + 650 2312/20 Executive Editor LitNet, a multi cultural online journal

Etienne and Abel See also Authors' dogs

Etienne Van Heerden

Photo by Johan Wilke

Author of novels, short story collections, books of poetry, essays, cabaret collections and a theoretical book on postmodernism
Founder editor of the multi cultural internet journal, LitNet
Hofmeyr Professor of Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Etienne Roché van Heerden was born on 3 December 1954 and grew up in the Eastern Cape Karoo where his Afrikaans speaking father was a merino farmer in the Graaff-Reinet (Agter-Sneeuberg) and Cradock (Fish River Valley) districts. His English mother was a mathematics teacher.
Etienne matriculated from Paul Roos Gymnasium in Stellenbosch and studied Law and Literature at the Universities of Stellenbosch (BA Honours, cum laude and LLB), the Witwatersrand (MA, cum laude) and Rhodes (PhD, with a thesis on engagement and postmodernism)
After articles, he was admitted as an attorney, briefly lectured law at a technikon and practised criminal law in the magistrates courts. He left lawyer's practice to work in advertising in Cape Town.
During the eighties he was a member of a group of Afrikaans writers secretly meeting the banned ANC of Mandela and exiled writers at the ' Victoria Falls Writers' Conference', held in Zimbabwe.
Since 1986 he has been teaching Literature, Literary Theory and Creative Writing — initially at the University of Zululand in Natal Province, thereafter the University of Rhodes in the Eastern Cape, and is now the Hofmeyr Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures, and chairs the Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies Section at the University of Cape Town.
He is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa and was a member of its prestigious international Writing Program in 1990, and and was Writer in Residence at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and the University of Leiden, Netherlands. He regularly teaches at universities in Europe and is frequently invited to read research papers or his fiction at academic conferences and writers' meetings or seminars (for example the Edinburgh Festival and Frankfurt Book Fair).
His satirical cabaret work is a regular feature on the major arts festivals in South Africa. His short stories and poems have been published in more than sixty anthologies in South Africa and overseas. Most of his work was translated into English and Dutch, and some also into German, French, Greek, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish.
He has been a regular columnist in a variety of journals and newspapers in South Africa, and currently writes a column syndicated to Die Burger, Volksblad and Beeld. He was the founder editor of LitNet - a multicultural South African web site.
Etienne van Heerden is married to Kaia, a practising doctor, and they have two daughters, Imke and Menán.

Photo by Philip de Vos 1998

Text by Etienne van Heerden, 2000

www.StellenboschWriters.com © Rosemarie Breuer

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