Andre Brink was born in Vrede, in the Free State. Brink moved to Lydenburg, where he matriculated at Hoerskool Lydenburg in 1952 with seven distinctions, the second student from the then Transvaal to achieve this feat and studied Afrikaans literature in the Potchefstroom University of South Africa. His immense attachment with literature carried him to France from 1959 to 1961, where he got his degree from Sorbonne University at Paris in comparative literature. During his stay, he came across an undeniable fact that changed his mind forever, as black students were treated on equal social bases with other students. Back to South Africa, he became one of the most prominent of young Afrikaans writers, including the novelist Etienne Leroux and the poet Breyten Breytenbach, who challenged the apartheid policy of the National party through his writings. During a second sojourn in France between 1967 and 1968, he hardened his political position against Apartheid, then writing both in Afrikaans and English to enlarged his audience and outplay the censure he was facing in his native country at the time.

Indeed, his novel Kennis van die aand (1973) was the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the South African government. André Brink translated Kennis van die aand into English and published it abroad as Looking on Darkness. This was his first self-translation. After that, André Brink wrote his works simultaneously in English and Afrikaans. In 1975, he obtained his PhD in Literature at the Rhodes University. In 2008, in an echo of a scene from his novel A Chain of Voices, his family was beset by tragedy, when his nephew Adri Brink was murdered in front of his wife and children in their Gauteng home. Andre Brink died on a flight from Amsterdam to South Africa from Belgium, where he had received an honorary doctorate from the Belgian Francophone Université Catholique de Louvain. He was married six times. Brink’s son, Anton Brink, is an artist.