François Bloemhof is a South African author, playwright, composer, copywriter and film reviewer. He writes mostly in Afrikaans and has won a number of prizes for his work.
Biography
François Bloemhof was born in the town of Paarl in the Cape Province, South Africa. In Grade 9 his English teacher awarded him 97% for a short story, “Murder by the Number”, which he considers the start of his writing career. While in Grade 11 he won the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award with the play A Social Gathering. Since then he has become the only author in the world to write so extensively and successfully for the adult, teenage and youth markets. He didn’t attempt to write a novel until some years after leaving school, chiefly because he believed there was no room for “his type of story” in what was then a rather conservative Afrikaans market. Die Nag Het Net Een Oog was a Gothic novel set in a small rural community, and with this in 1991 he won the De Kat Prize, at that time the country’s most prestigious literary award. Many books for adults followed, as did numerous awards and nominations. Bloemhof’s adult work contains thriller, supernatural and more conventional dramatic elements. He has also written a secret agent series as well as one starring a female detective, Alma van der Pool, both being the first of their kind in the Afrikaans publishing field. To date he has also written a cabaret, the filmed screenplay Double Echo, award-winning stage plays and radio dramas and serials. He also writes for teenagers, winning several prizes in competitions with books like Slinger-slinger, Die Dae Toe Ek Elvis Was, Stad aan die Einde van die Wêreld and Nie Vir Kinders Nie. A “scary story” series for young readers, Rillers, comprises eight titles and were regular winners in the annual ATKV-Veertjie Competition, in which readers of the relevant age evaluate the books. The author’s latest youth series, a trilogy, is called Spooksoeker. Bloemhof was the first Afrikaans author to publish a comic strip series, the Agent Snoet books in which a hapless secret agent is aided by his faithful yet domineering Siamese cat, Felino. World-firsts by this author include an interactive newspaper serial ; a youth novel with its own PC game; a Flipom, which is a two-in-one book with two covers that can be read first from either side and with both stories having the same characters; and a novel including an author-composed soundtrack CD performed by renowned South African musicians and singers. Bloemhof has now published over 100 books for different age groups.
