Karel Schoeman (pronounced Skeuman) was born in 1939 in Trompsburg, in the Orange Free State, South Africa. After schooling in Paarl in the Cape Province, he studied linguistics at the University of Bloemfontein and then converted to Catholicism, entered the seminary in Pretoria. After three years of novitiate in the Franciscan monasteries in Ireland, where he learned Gaelic, he finally renounced his vows and returned to South Africa, obtained a higher diploma in librarianship. This job will take him first to the Netherlands for five years, then back to Bloemfontein, and finally to Cape Town, where he remained until his retirement in 1999. Alongside this activity, Karel Schoeman is dedicated to writing and published a dozen novels written in Afrikaans. In France, they are gradually released belatedly in Phoebus. It is also the author of short stories, historical works, biographies and translations of various texts in Afrikaans Gaelic, German, Russian, Dutch and English.
solidarity of the struggle of blacks against apartheid, Karel Schoeman received in 1999 from the hands of Nelson Mandela, the Order of Merit, the highest award in South Africa. Today, the writer lives in retirement in a remote village in the veld. These novels, still little known in France despite the Best Foreign Book awarded in 2009 to This life, tell a disillusioned South Africa and loneliness own the human condition.
Read (in French): In
strange land, Robert Laffont, 1991
Season of farewells , Phoebus, 2004
Back to the beloved country , Phoebus, 2006
This life , Phoebus, 2009
Sources: Street books, Phoebus, Wikipedia
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