A SPORTFUL MALICE, a comedy of revenge

256 pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2014

A comic novel about a South African literary scholar, set in Italy.

Writer, translator and academic Michiel Heyns, previously Professor of English at Stellenbosch University, is the author of six previous novels, including Lost Ground and Bodies Politic, for which he was awarded the 2009 Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction. His reviews for The Sunday Independent have won him the English Academy's Pringle Prize for Reviewing for 2006 and again for 2010. He also won the English Academy's Sol Plaatje Award for Translating in 2008 and the South African Translator's Institute Award for a Literary Translation for his translation of Marlene van Niekerk's Afrikaans novel, Agaat.