A South African Native, Mr. Breytenbach is an internationally celebrated poet, activist, painter and author of numerous novels, short story compilations, essays and dramatic works. A committed opponent of apartheid, Mr. Breytenbach moved from South Africa in the early 1960’s to Paris where he became a political activist. In 1975, on a covert visit to South Africa he was arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for high treason. Mr. Breytenbach's memoir of this experience, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1983), is widely recognized as a South African classic and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Known for featuring rich visuals, a powerful use of metaphor and a complex blending of references from Buddhism, Afrikaans idiomatic speech and recollections of the South African landscape, Mr. Breytenbach is considered to be the finest living poet of the Afrikaans language. Having written over 30 books of poetry, Mr. Breytenbach's verse volumes include: The Iron Cow Must Sweat (1964), Footscript (1976), Death White As Words (1978), In Africa Even the Flies are Happy (1978) and Judas Eye (1988). The Companion to African Literatures describes Mr. Breytenbach's writings as “marked by a combination of Kafkaesque skepticism and a celebration of life; images connect surreal worlds to the harsh and brutal realities of apartheid, magical realism to critical realism. His is not the direct ideological onslaught nor the quick and easy answer, but the delicate scalpel of a neurosurgeon constantly engaged in a search for the mad spots on the brain of the human species.”  Mr. Breytenbach's most recent work, Veil of Footsteps (2008), is a  memoir that blends fantasy and realism through his own history and the places where he lives and works and regularly visits.

Among his many other accomplishments and talents, Mr. Breytenbach is also an internationally exhibited painter whose artwork, like his writing, noted Caryn James in a 1993 New York Times article, “is aswirl with images of mirrors and doubles, in conversation he specializes in seeing multiple sides of every issue.” Many of his paintings portray surreal animal and human figures, often in captivity.

Breyten Breytenbach has been honored with numerous literary and art awards, including the APB Prize, CAN Award (five times) Allan Paton Award for Literature, Rapport Prize, Hertzog Prize, Reina Prinsen-Geerling Prize, Van der Hoogt Prize, Jan Campert Award and Jacobus van Looy Prize for Literature and Art. In 1992 he co-founded the Goree Institute, which aims to strengthen democratic processes and cultural research and expression in Africa, and in 1995 he co-founded the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Natal. He has also taught at numerous Universities, including the University of Natal, New York University, University of Cape Town and Princeton University, and has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cape Town and the University of Natal.