Michiel Heyns was born in the university town of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and after graduation from that university and from the University of Cambridge in England, spent the better, or at any rate larger, part of his life lecturing in English at his alma mater. During this time his writing was mainly confined to academic studies (his monograph Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century novel appeared from Oxford University Press in 1994), but eventually he realized that if he was ever going to write the novel he was surely destined to write, he'd better do so fairly soon. This realization produced The Children's Day, his first novel, and also the first to be published in the US. The success of this novel emboldened him to take early retirement and to write full-time; he has since published six more novels in South Africa, a seventh due to appear early in 2017. Some of his novels have been translated into Dutch, Afrikaans, French, and Chinese. The French translation of The Typewriter's Tale was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger, and won the Prix de l'Union Interalliee.
Michiel has also translated several novels from Afrikaans into English. His translation of Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (winner of the Sunday Times Literary Award in South Africa and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK) won the Sol Plaatjes Award for Translation in 2007 as well as The South African Translators' Institute Award for Literary Translation, and was published in the US by Tin House Press. More recently, his translation of Bundu by Chris Barnard was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (now the Booker International).
A full list of publications can be found on his website: www.michielheyns.co.za
