Born into an Afrikaner family of writers in Kroonstad, Orange Free State, South Africa, she grew up on a farm, attending primary and secondary school in the area. In 1970, at the height of John Vorster’s apartheid years, she penned an anti-apartheid poem for her school magazine: Gee vir my ‘n land waar swart en wit hand aan hand, vrede en liefde kan bring in my mooi land (Give me a land where black and white hand in hand, Can bring peace and love to my beautiful land) scandalising her conservative Afrikaans-speaking community and bringing the attention of the national media to her parents’ doorstep:

In 1973 she earned a BA (Hons mwa) degree in English from the University of the Orange Free State, and an MA in Afrikaans from the University of Pretoria in 1976. With a teaching diploma from the University of South Africa (UNISA) she would lecture at a segregated teacher’s training college for black South Africans.

Later, Krog would edit the now-defunct, independent Afrikaans journal Die Suid-Afrikaan, co-founded by Hermann Giliomee in 1984. On the strength of her work there, she was invited to join the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) by Pippa Green, head of radio news. For two years, reporting as Antjie Samuel, she contributed to the radio programme AM Live with items on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Of the commission she said:

When the TRC hearings were completed in 1997, Krog took up the post of Parliamentary Editor at SABC.

In February 2006, the poet Stephen Watson, writing in New Contrast, accused her of plagiarism. He claimed that she “lifted the entire conception of [The Stars say ‘Tsau’] from [his] Return of the Moon”, and that she also plagiarised from the work of Ted Hughes. Krog strongly denied the claims.

There was this goat, written with Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele and published by UKZN Press in March 2009, investigates the Truth Commission testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile.