20th-century South African novelists

Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Zambian-born South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about the international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries, seen from the viewpoints of both black and white families.

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".

Harry Saul Bloom (1 January 1913 – 28 July 1981) was a South African journalist, novelist, activist and lecturer.

John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is a South African-born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Prize (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.

André Philippus Brink, OIS (29 May 1935 – 6 February 2015) was a South African novelist. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town.

Noel Langley (25 December 1911 – 4 November 1980) was a South African-born (later naturalised American) novelist, playwright, screenwriter and director. He wrote the screenplay which formed the basis for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and is one of the three credited screenwriters for the film. His finished script for the film was revised by Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, the other credited screenwriters. Langley objected to their changes and lamented the final cut upon first seeing it, but later revised his opinion. He attempted to write a sequel based on The Marvelous Land of Oz using many of the concepts he had added to its predecessor, but this was never released.

William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE (10 December 1903 – 20 September 1973) was a South African and British author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He also wrote a series of librettos for Benjamin Britten. He wrote some of his poetry under the pseudonym Robert Pagan.

Dalene Matthee (13 October 1938 – 20 February 2005) was a South African author best known for her four Forest Novels, written in and around the Knysna Forest. Her books have been translated into fourteen languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Icelandic, and over a million copies have been sold worldwide.

Marie Warder (born Marie van Zyl, 30 April 1927 – 20 October 2014) was a journalist, novelist and activist best known for her activities raising awareness about hemochromatosis. Warder founded the Hemochromatosis Society of South Africa, and the Canadian Hemochromatosis Society (CHS), and was founder and long-time president of the International Association of Hemochromatosis Societies (IAHS), writing the detailing leaflets for them all, which meant that, at that stage, every publication of the Canadian Hemochromatosis Society carried the footnote: "Produced for the International Association of Haemochromatosis Societies."

Margaret Bakkes (14 December 1931 – 29 June 2016) was a South African writer.