Intimate Stranger is a gorgeous guide to writing and the writing life by this South African man of the world. Born in 1939 to a family dating back to seventeenth century White Afrikaners, Breytenbach grew to oppose South Africa’s twentieth century apartheid system, moved to Paris at age 20, and became a writer, painter, and English teacher. There, he met and married a French woman of Vietnamese descent in 1962 despite his home country’s Immorality Act, which legislated against interracial marriage. During his years of exile he published numerous

books of poetry and prose, including A Season in Paradise (1976; published in English in 1980), which describes nostalgia for his Wellington childhood along with his disdain for his country’s unjust racial policies. He founded an antiapartheid organization, Okhela, while living in Paris and was trailed and arrested under the Terrorist Act the next time he visited home.