André Brink, a towering South African literary presence for decades whose work in English and Afrikaans fell afoul of apartheid-era censors, died Friday, South African news reports said, citing his publisher, N.B. Publishers. He was 79.

Mr. Brink died while traveling from Europe to Cape Town on a flight departing from Amsterdam late Friday. The cause of his death was not immediately made known.

Mr. Brink’s work was often cited alongside that of Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee as an exemplar of South Africa’s ability to transform the experience of harsh racial politics into literature with a global reach. He had been returning from a visit to Belgium, where he received an honorary doctorate, according to the South African SAPA news agency.

The language of many of his early works was Afrikaans, the mother-tongue of the Afrikaner minority whose leaders came to power in 1948 and set the country on the path to policies of social engineering and racial division that ended formally with the first free election in 1994, which brought Nelson Mandela to power.