…Nelson Mandela said to him, “You know, when I was in prison, it was you who changed the way I saw the world.” Brink believed that Mandela was “not addressing me in the singular, as an individual, but in the plural, as one of the writers who had shed light on [Mandela’s] course.” Literature “had become one of the torches that guided” the future president.

The New Yorker offers a retrospective on André Brink, the South African writer who inspired, among many, Nelson Mandela.