By 1958, when the Afrikaner writer André Brink was only 23, he had already published two novels and seen his first play produced. It was a highly promising start to a literary career but no real surprise to Brink. "I knew from the age of nine that whatever else I might become - a train driver or street sweeper or whatever - I would also be a writer," he recalls. "It was a compulsion."
His career was apparently mapped out when he set off for Paris for post-graduate study at the Sorbonne, but in France the course of that career was irrevocably changed. "The influence of the existentialist writers, Camus in particular, fundamentally altered my writing and the way I looked at writing," he says. "My early work suddenly seemed terribly sterile and naturalistic. And from 10,000 kilometres away, South Africa began to look like a startlingly different place."
Brink returned home a changed man. He became editor of Sestiger , an avant-garde literary journal that gave its name to a group of South African writers - Sestigers - who began in the 60s to challenge the stifling literary and social conventions of Afrikaner culture.
"You have to remember what Afrikaans fiction looked like at the time," he explains. "Novels were totally dominated by droughts and poor whites and locusts. We were the first generation of writers to challenge that and to try and write in an up-to-date way, influenced by the cultural cross-currents in Europe and elsewhere. Initially our challenge wasn't overtly political. It was more focused on the moral and the religious and the sexual. But over time it did begin to acquire a much more specific political thrust."
Brink's progression towards outright opposition to the Pretoria regime culminated in him being the first writer in Afrikaans to have his work banned. His 1974 novel, Looking on Darkness , had been acclaimed by fellow South African author Alan Paton, but its treatment of a sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman proved too much for the state censors.
"The experience was initially devastating. If you write in a small language not understood anywhere else in the world and you are banned, you become a non-person because you have no readers," he says. "So I started writing in English alongside Afrikaans. I thought it would ensure that even if I could not be read at home, at least I could survive temporarily abroad."
The strategy paid off. While his work continued to be suppressed in South Africa, overseas his reputation was steadily enhanced; he was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the 70s for his novels An Instant in the Wind and Rumours of Rain . "It was a weird time, to say the least," he now says. "But in a curious way it was also very fulfilling. That is the advantage of working in a situation of oppression. Literature suddenly becomes the sort of thing that is reported on the front page of newspapers. You are involved in something larger than yourself and something, you hope, that will be worthwhile."
Brink's burgeoning use of English also provided an unexpected artistic spur. "Every language is better geared to saying some things and not others," he explains. He now writes the first drafts of his novels in a combination of English and Afrikaans before re-working - a more accurate description than translating -the text for publication.
"It's a terribly complex process and it's just as well that no reader has access to it," he laughs. "Sometimes I write virtually the whole thing in English. In my book On the Contrary I needed to think in terms of an 18th-century novel, and as there were no models in Afrikaans I fell back on Fielding and Sterne. But my last novel, Devil's Valley , is set in an archetypal Afrikaner village and the first draft was largely in Afrikaans. But there were 13 drafts in all, so the character of the book changed as it was formalised. The final Afrikaans and English versions are never identical."
As an award-winning translator of Spanish, German, English and French works into Afrikaans, Brink says that, when translating someone else's work, he is completely faithful to the original. "But when it's my book I don't give a damn about the original author."
For a novelist who, during the apartheid years, had explicitly set out to fulfil the role journalists were prevented from carrying out, the election of a majority government in 1994 could have been something of a double-edged sword. Did he ever feel like an author deprived of a subject?
"Perhaps for one moment there was a sense of, 'Oh my God. What can I write about now?' But then came this heady discovery of the spectrum widening so much, and there was infinitely more to write about than ever before."
Devil's Valley is part adventure yarn and part magical allegory: an investigative journalist goes in search of an isolated and ferociously close-knit religious community. There is little of the political directness of some of his anti-apartheid period books, but the distinctive strengths and, mostly, weaknesses, of the Boer mentality - in an admittedly extreme setting - are again perceptively probed and exhibited.
"South African literature in general has been assessing the new situation and trying to come to terms with it," Brink says. "And as yet there have been few spectacular new advances. But in terms of my own work, the elation has continued. If there is anything that frustrates me, it is that there are so many new things that I simply cannot write fast enough."
• Devil's Valley by Andr Brink is published by Vintage
