[1][2] In the 1960s Brink, Ingrid Jonker, Etienne Leroux and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the significant Afrikaans dissident intellectual and literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers").

While André Brink's early novels were especially concerned with his own opposition to apartheid, his later work engaged the new questions of life in South Africa since the end of National Party rule in 1994.

Back in South Africa, he became one of the most prominent young Afrikaans writers, along with the novelist Etienne Leroux and the poet Breyten Breytenbach, to challenge the apartheid policy of the National party through his writings.

During a second journey in France between 1967 and 1968, he hardened his political position against Apartheid and began writing both in Afrikaans and English to enlarge his audience and outplay the censure he was facing in his native country at the time.

[6] Brink died on a flight from Amsterdam to South Africa, having visited Belgium to receive an honorary doctorate from the Belgian Francophone Université Catholique de Louvain.