Michiel Heyns

Michiel Heyns is a South African novelist, translator and literary critic. Until 2003, he was Professor of English Literature at the University of Stellenbosch when the success of his first novel allowed him to become a full-time writer. As an academic he is best known for his work on 19th and 20th century literature, especially his acclaimed study, Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1994).

In 2002 he made his debut as a novelist with the comic coming-of-age story, The Children's Day. This was followed by another novel of high comedy, The Reluctant Passenger (2003) which has since been translated into French. His subsequent novels have moved away from the South African milieu: The Typewriter's Tale (2005), which focuses on Theodora Bosanquet, the amanuensis of Henry James, was followed by Bodies Politic (2008), which deals with the English suffrage movement of the turn of the 20th century.

He is also the award-winning translator of Tom Dreyer and Marlene van Niekerk (most famously of her The Way of the Women), and continues to write widely as a literary critic and reviewer.