Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and winner of six major South African prizes, this is the author’s first book in English

A fiercely intelligent and unsparingly brutal ’African Western’, for fans of The North Water and Blood Meridian

Willem Anker was born in Citrusdal in the Western Cape in 1979 and lectures in creative writing at Stellenbosch University. His first novel, Siegfried, was published in 2007. Red Dog was published in Afrikaans in 2014 and won six major literary prizes in South Africa. It is his first novel to be translated into English.

Author Residence: South Africa

Author Hometown: Citrusdal, South Africa

Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize

The Booker judges call Red Dog ’a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project.’

’Sensational…Anker writes like a talented demon’ Antonia Senior, The Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month

’One of the best antiheroes you will read this year leaps from the pages’ The Times Best Summer Books

’Ambitious…brings South Africa’s bloody birth to life’ Spectator

’A powerful and stark historical novel…A twenty-first century story in the vein of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…This staggeringly original blend of fact and fiction is savage but totally gripping’ NB Magazine

’The hottest piece of writing out here…a highly readable and relentless tale…passionately nihilistic with inserts of great noir humour and even sometimes truly moving tenderness’ Marlene van Niekerk

’The Afrikaans equivalent of the postmodern cowboys-and-Indians tales of Cormac McCarthy.’
Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart

’Extremely wild, dramatic, original, dangerous and riveting. It is a literary experience that I will not forget.’
Sissi Reads