N. Ravi Shanker lives and works in Palakkad, and regularly translates from Malayalam and Tamil into English. He is the translator of Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu (2004).
Etienne van Heerden's debut youth novel, Matoli, was published in 1978. During the 1980s he was a member of a group of Afrikaans writers secretly meeting exiled ANC members at the now-famous Victor