UNDER A BLOOD RED SKY, a memoir, translated by Michiel Heyns

431pp., paperback, First English Language Edition, Tafelberg, Cape Town, (2021) 2026

ISBN: 9780624095811

First published in Dutch in 2021 as Om het hart terug te bregen. It won the 2023 Henriette Roland Holst Prize. The Afrikaans ‘back-translation’, Onder ’n bloedrooi hemel, was published in 2023.

Annemarié van Niekerk interweaves her return to South Africa in 2015 after her friend Ruben and his mother are brutally murdered on his farm in the Eastern Cape with memories of earlier journeys from the 1960s to the 1980s: from Port Elizabeth, where she grew up in a loving but strict Afrikaner family; to Umtata, where she lectured and fell in love with Denzel, a black colleague; and to Hillbrow and Yeoville, where she and Denzel illegally lived together, until violence tore their relationship apart.

"We can best explore the deep history of a society through first-hand testimonies of personal experience. Om het hart terug te bregen allows us privileged insight into life as it is and has been in the South Africa of our times." J.M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate

"van Niekerk writes with brutal honesty about her search for identity as a white woman in South Africa. This becomes more than autobiography, more than a chronicle or an unburdening of emotion. van Niekerk possesses the delicate feeling for character, the balance and rhythm, the sense of place of the novelist ... Beauty to move you to tears." Deborah Steinmair

Annemarié van Niekerk moved to the Netherlands in 2002 and lives in The Hague. She freelances as a book reviewer for the Dutch newspaper Trouw. She is a collaborator at Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, a research fellow at the University of the Free State, and teaches Afrikaans at the International School of Amsterdam. She has compiled three collections of stories: Raising The Blinds: A Century of South African Women’s Stories (1990), Vrouevertellers 1843-1993 (1994) and The Torn Veil: Women’s Short Stories from the Continent of Africa (1998).