ANTJIE KROG was born in 1952 in the Free State Province in South Africa. In 1993 she became editor of a progressive Afrikaans language monthly in Cape Town and later worked as a radio journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in the late '90s, all the while writing extensively for newspapers and journals. She and her radio colleagues received the SABC Pringle Award for excellence in journalism for their coverage of the commission hearings. She has won major awards in almost all the genres and media in which she has worked, including poetry, journalism, fiction, and translation. Krog's first volume of poetry was published when she was seventeen years old, and she has since released thirteen volumes of poetry, including Skinned, receiving nearly every literary award available for works in Afrikaans. She is married to architect John Samuel and is the mother of four children.