Mr Michiel Heyns grew up in various towns and cities all over South Africa, and studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. He lectured in English at the University of Stellenbosch until 2003, when he took retirement to write full-time. Apart from a book on the nineteenth-century novel and many critical essays, he has published eight novels, the latest of which is I am Pandarus (Jonathan Ball, 2017). A ninth, A Poor Season for Whales, is due out in March 2020. He has produced several translations, two of which, Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women and Chris Barnard’s Bundu, were short-listed for the (then) Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His most recent translations are Cul-de-Sac by Elsa Joubert, The Troubled Times of Magrieta Prinsloo by Ingrid Winterbach and Red Dog by Willem Anker.