Sir Laurens Van der Post

Sir Laurens Van der Post (1906-1996)

South African writer, best known for his books of personal reflection on travel and anthropology, and whose prose is noted for its striking imagery and minute observation. Born in Philippolis, Van der Post was raised on a working ranch and educated at Grey College in Bloemfontein, South Africa. In 1925, with two other South African writers, Roy Campbell and William Plomer, he helped start the magazine Voorslag, which was strongly opposed to the South African apartheid government. Due to his involvement with the periodical, Van der Post was forced to leave South Africa and so traveled to Japan, where he wrote his first novel, In a Province (1934), an early indictment of South African racism. From 1939 to 1946 Van der Post served with the British army during World War II (1939-1945); he spent three years (1943-1946) in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, an experience on which he based his books The Seed and the Sower (1963; filmed as Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in 1983), The Night of the New Moon (1970), and Portrait of Japan (1968).     

Van der Post's early exposure to San myths led to a lifelong fascination with this ethnic group of the Kalahari Desert of northern South Africa, whose traditional way of life Van der Post has idealized in his writings as an intuitively spiritual state of perfect harmony with the natural environment. His works on San culture, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), A Mantis Carol (1975), and Testament to the Bushman (with Jane Taylor, 1984), are probably his best known books.  Other books by Van der Post include Venture to the Interior (1952), Flamingo Feather (1955), Jung and the Story of Our Time (1976), Yet Being Someone Other (1982), A Walk with a White Bushman (with Jean-Marc Pottiez, 1986), About Blady (1991), and Feather Fall: An Anthology (edited by Jean-Marc Pottiez, 1994). Van der Post was knighted by the British government in 1981.