I FEEL HIGHLY honoured by the Franschhoek Literary Festival and the Brink family, especially Karina Magdalena Brink, André's widow, for inviting me to participate in this year's festival.

First, let me share with you how I arrived at the title of my talk, ‘Andre Brink: Enigma, Betrayer, Villain or Hero: An Outsider's Take on this Giant of South African Letters’. This is my personal reflection on who I am next to André Brink; when, where and how our paths crossed; and what those encounters meant, as well as what they have come to mean to me.

No doubt, you – or at any rate, many of you – will agree with me that I am an outsider in this situation, an outsider looking in at the particular life of one André Phillipus Brink. I am an outsider because of who we were not so long ago when there was no way I could have been anything but an outsider in the life of this man. However, our paths did eventually cross, some 25 years ago, in 1990, to be precise, when something I would never have dreamt of happened: I became a writer. Anywhere else in the world, this would not be a noteworthy event. But given who I was – the where and the when – it was indeed remarkable.

Shortly after my first book was published in 1990, I was invited to my very first writer's conference, at the University of Cape Town. UCT was a foreign country to the likes of me. Brink could have studied there. He in fact lectured there. But it was forbidden territory to one such as I. However, this was different. I was not going there to study or lecture, but to a one-day affair – a writers’ conference.