Who is karel schoeman?

Answer 1

Karel Schoeman is a renowned South African writer, born in 1939. He is primarily known as a novelist -- most famously internationally for his novel, Another Country -- but is more productive as a well-respected historian and biographer. Although he is critically one of the most acclaimed South African writers (he is generally regarded by South African academics as being an equal of the more famous J.M. Coetzee), this has not translated into popular success because his books are written in Afrikaans (althought the best ones have been translated into a number of foreign languages) and in a difficult style. To a wider audience his best-known work is probably Promised Land which has been made into an award-winning film. He has won all the major South African literary prizes (mostly more than once), been awarded several academic honors and was one of only two writers to be honored by Nelson Mandela upon the latter's retirement as president in 1999 for his contribution to South African literature and history. Schoeman is renowned for his reclusive behavior and reluctance to engage with a wider public, preferring instead to write (he has published more than 100 books, 18 of which had been novels). He claims to have forsaken writing fiction in the late 1990s, concentrating rather on his study of the South African past.