Willem Anker was born in Citrusdal in the Western Cape in 1979 and lectures in creative writing at Stellenbosch University. His first novel, Siegfried, was published in 2007. Red Dog was published in Afrikaans in 2014 and won six major literary prizes in South Africa. It is his first novel to be translated into English.

Translator

Michiel Heyns grew up in various towns and cities all over South Africa, and studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. He lectured in English at the University of Stellenbosch until 2003, when he took retirement to write full-time. Apart from a book on the nineteenth-century novel and many critical essays, he has published eight novels, the latest of which is I am Pandarus (Jonathan Ball, 2017). A ninth, A Poor Season for Whales, is due out in March 2020. He has produced several translations, two of which, Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women and Chris Barnard’s Bundu,  were short-listed for the (then) Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.