News
Leon de Kock wins 2011 SALA Award for Literary Translation
Read report in The New Age newspaper
Read report on Stellenbosch University’s main website
Interview with Bruce Dennill in the Citizen
Umuzi releases Leon de Kock’s novel, Bad Sex
See also entry under Selected Books, or click here to go there now.
Welcome
Welcome to my website. I am a poet, translator, essayist, writer of fiction, and a professional literary practitioner. I have published three volumes of poetry: Bloodsong (1997), gone to the edges (2006), and Bodyhood (2010) – see Selected Books.
My work as a literary translator includes the English rendition of Triomf (1999), Marlene van Niekerk’s major Afrikaans novel chronicling the rise and fall of apartheid in the tragi-comic tale of a low-life Afrikaans family, the Benades of Triomf, Johannesburg. My translation of Triomf won the SA Translators Institute’s Award for Outstanding Translation in the year 2000 (see Literary Translation).
My other published translations include Intimately Absent (2010), a cycle of poems by Afrikaans poet Cas Vos which deals with the Abelard and Heloise saga. A second volume of my translations arising from the work of Vos, Duskant die Donker/ Before it Darkens, was published in 2011. Also in press is a translation of the novel In Stede van die Liefde by Afrikaans novelist Etienne van Heerden, under the title In Love’s Place.
My work as a literary practitioner is centred on my position as Professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. I was formerly an English professor at both the University of the Witwatersrand (where I was also Head of the School of Literature and Language Studies), and the University of South Africa (see CV).
I write critical essays (peer-reviewed research articles published in scientific academic journals, see Research Articles), but I also write in the public press – literary, travel and other essays in publications such as the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Times, Financial Mail, the Mail & Guardian, Rapport, LitNet, and others (see Literary Journalism and Travel Writing).
I have published several scholarly books, including Civilising Barbarians, a monograph, and Herman Charles Bosman in/oor Afrikaans (see Selected Books).
The following description appears in The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945 (Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper, and Craig Mackenzie, Columbia University Press, 2010):
De Kock, Leon (b. 1956) Poet, critic, translator. Born in Mayfair, Johannesburg, he studied at the Rand Afrikaans University and the University of Leeds. After working as a journalist for several years, he joined the English Department of the University of South Africa, where he was professor until 2006. He is now head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Author of Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (1996), he compiled (with Ian Tromp) the anthology The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990–1995 (1996) and was founding editor of the English-studies journal Scrutiny2. His first collection of poems, Bloodsong (1997), is a set of deeply personal poems that probe childhood experiences and grapple with understanding life in contemporary South Africa. Poems from this collection won him the 1995 Thomas Pringle Poetry Award. He is also the translator into English of the Afrikaans novel Triomf (1994, trans. 1999), by Marlene van Niekerk. His articles on cultural politics in South Africa have introduced new dimensions to debates on postcoloniality. A second volume of poetry, Gone to the Edges, appeared in 2006.