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PROFILES A-C
Ahmed Kathrada was born a shopkeeper’s son in Schweizer-Reneke, attended school in Jobannesburg and was distributing leaflets and chalking freedom slogans on the wall while still a schoolboy. Sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, he spent twenty-six years in jail – Pretoria, Robben Island and Pollsmoor – for his political beliefs. On his release, he became a Member of Parliament and a Parliamentary Counsellor in the office of President Mandela. His books include Letters from Robben Island, his autobiography Memoirs and A Simple Freedom with Tim Couzens, and he was a contributing editor to Mandela – The Authorised Portrait.
Andrew Brown practises as an advocate in Cape Town, and is a reservist sergeant in the South African Police Service. His first two novels were Inyenzi, about the Rwandan genocide, and the crime thriller Coldsleep Lullaby, which won the 2006 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. His work of non-fiction, Street Blues, about his experiences as a police reservist, was shortlisted for the Alan Paton Award. His most recent novel, Refuge, was shortlisted in the Africa group for the Commonwealth Literary Prize. He lives with his wife and three children in Cape Town.
Andy Mason has been actively involved in cartooning and comic art since the late 70s. In the early ‘80s he joined Ravan Press in Johannesburg, worked on Staffrider magazine, produced a cartoon history of South Africa for the People’s Workbook and drew for alternative magazines like Learn and Teach, Upbeat and New Ground. Returning to his home town of Durban, he launched the underground comix magazine PAX (Pre-Azanian Comix) and co-founded Artworks Communications, a graphic design and publishing agency specialising in reader-friendly illustrated publications and comics for pro-democracy NGOs, trade unions and educational organisations. In the early 2000’s he formed the Durban Cartoon Project and Mamba Comix. In 2008 he moved to Cape Town and co-founded the Centre for Comic, Illustrative and Book Arts (CCIBA) at Stellenbosch, and in 2009 co-edited the first in the Year in Cartoons series of annual anthologies of South African political cartooning.
Anna Trapido trained as an anthropologist at Cambridge, completed her PhD in the Department of Community Health at Wits, then qualified as a chef at the Prue Leith Academy in Centurion. Both her books have won Gold awards for Food History at the international World Gourmet Cookery Book Awards – once in Beijing and once in Paris. The first, To the Banqueting House: African Cuisine – an Epic Journey, is a sort of African diaspora story told through food and traces African migrations, via foodstuffs and recipes, from West Africa to Haiti or South Carolina, from Ethiopia to Old Testament Palestine, etc, and has recipes from all over the continent. The second, Hunger for Freedom, is a biography of Mandela, told through a host of foodie anecdotes that he poured out to her, and through the reminiscences of old Struggle comrades.
Ann Donald worked as a newspaper journalist and magazine editor for 21 years, including 10 years at the Pretoria News, editor of Longevity, managing editor of Cosmopolitan, editor of Fairlady magazine, and editor and publisher of Woman's Value/Dit. After leaving Fairlady in 2005, Ann worked as a freelance writer and media consultant, and is still active on both fronts. In 2006 she opened an independent bookshop, Kalk Bay Books, which has become a haven for booklovers, regularly hosting launches, discussions, lecture series, and poetry evenings. In March 2010, Ann took over a restaurant adjacent to the bookshop, now called the Annex, which carries through the book theme from the bookshop and will run programmes of events with a literary flavour.
Anne van Zyl is Head of the Oprah Winfrey Academy in Gauteng, having had 22 years of experience as the head of four different schools: Pretoria Girls’ High, St Stithians Collegiate, Stanford Lake College and Bridge House in Franschhoek. The last three are among the South African members of the Round Square International movement, of which she is a life member, with its emphasis on internationalism, democracy, environmental awareness, adventure, leadership and service (IDEALS). Anne attended St Cyprians, was an American Field Service exchange student, and studied at Stellenbosch, UCT, the Sorbonne and UNISA, also working in Paris for some years.
Fruit of a Poisoned Tree is Antony Altbeker’s third book about crime and justice in South Africa. His first, The Dirty Work of Democracy, won the Recht Malan prize for non-fiction and was short-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. His second, A Country at War with Itself, is widely regarded as the most authoritative popular account of the causes of South Africa’s crime problem and of what to do to fix it.
Ari Sitas completed his PhD at Wits on the emergence of trade unions and social movements among black urban and migrant workers (1960s-1980s) under the supervision of Eddie and the late David Webster in 1984. He joined UCT as a professor in May 2009 after 26 years at the University of Natal, later UKZN. He has been a senior fellow and research associate in a number of institutions – the University of California, Berkeley, Ruskin College and Oxford – and is a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Guest Professor at the Albert-Ludvigs University of Freiburg. Ari is also a writer, dramatist and poet and was a leading intellectual and activist in the Anti-Apartheid movement.
Arja Salafranca’s debut collection of short stories, The Thin Line, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. She has published two collections of poetry, A life Stripped of Illusions, and The Fire in Which we Burn. Her poetry is also collected in Isis X (Botsotso). She received the 2010 Dalro Award for poetry and has twice received the Sanlam Award, for fiction and poetry . She selected stories for The Edge of Things, an anthology of South African short fiction, appearing in 2011. She edits the Life supplement in The Sunday Independent and is studying toward an MA in Creative Writing at Wits.
Barbara Trapido was born in Cape Town, but moved to Durban aged four and studied English Literature at university there. She has chronicled her Durban childhood in her autobiographical novel, Frankie and Stankie. After graduating, she left for London with her husband, historian Stanley Trapido, and taught there in inner city schools for three years before moving with him to Durham and then to Oxford, where she still lives. Her first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack , won a Whitbread Award and she has written five more, the latest being Sex and Stravinsky. She has been shortlisted for the Whitbread and Costa Awards three times, has twice been on the Booker longlist and this year was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Southbank Literature Award.
Ben Williams is the editor of BOOK Southern Africa, a literary network and news source found at book.co.za. In addition to chairing two panels at the FLF, Ben will be liveblogging the festival with his BOOK SA team.
Camaren Peter is a research consultant working on sustainability related development and works with the Sustainability Institute and the African Centre for Cities at UCT, and decision-makers in government and business. He is also a senior lecturer at the School of Public Management at Stellenbosch. He studied physics and astrophysics before joining the CSIR, where his core research revolved around modelling complex systems for decision-making. This sparked an interest in systems theory which led to a focus on problems concerning the mutual sustainability of social, economic and ecological systems. His PhD research was concerned with the core issues governing sustainability and how to model sustainable futures using a combination of probability-based models and participatory processes. He has worked closely with decision-makers from national to city scales to help determine how strategic transitions to sustainability can be achieved, and has a special interest in climate change and global change effects. More recently Camaren has been researching emerging theories governing transitions to sustainability.
Carmel Rickard has a background in English and history. In 1980 she left teaching for journalism and soon began to specialise in writing about the intersection of law and politics. She had Nieman Fellowship to Harvard in 1992 and was for some time legal editor of the Sunday Times. She now lives in a tiny rural Free State dorp where she writes, edits and walks with her dogs in the veld.
Carrol Clarkson is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English at UCT. She is the author of J.M. Coetzee: Countervoices, and has published widely in the areas of literary semantics, literary theory and post-apartheid South African literature and art. Her book Drawing the Line: Towards an Aesthetics of Post-Apartheid Justice, is due for publication with Fordham University Press. In 2009 she won UCT's Distinguished Teacher's Award. She hosts the internationally recognized Coetzee Collective discussion group at UCT.
Charles van Onselen is a social historian and Research Professor attached to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria. Deeply suspicious of racially-predicated nationalisms, his writings have sought consistently to highlight how often 'local' phenomena can be traced back to 'global' developments; while regional events in turn, have frequently helped shape international history. His interest is currently focused on a 'Mancunian-Irishman' executed at Pretoria's Central Prison in 1910.
Concert pianist Christopher Duigan is a Steinway Artist and has been recognised as a ‘South African piano icon’ and ‘national musical treasure’ (Classic Feel June 2009). He studied at the University of Natal with Isabella Stengel, UCT and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He has performed extensively with all leading South African orchestras, and in recital has achieved a popular following through his innovative presentation and programming. For the past seven years, he has produced a programme of classical music concerts featuring a variety of musicians in Franschhoek, including the Franschhoek Classic Music Festival.
Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944 and now lives in France. He is the author of seven novels, including A Separate Development, winner of the David Higham Prize; Kruger’s Alp, winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, and Serenity House, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and also a poet, playwright and journalist. His most recent book was a collection of short stories, In The Garden of Bad Dreams, and his new novel Shooting Angels is due in September.
Colleen Higgs is the publisher of Modjaji Books, one of the most active and interesting independent publishers in South Africa, and a highly regarded poet with two collections, Halfborn Woman and Lava Lamp Poems. While working at the Centre for the Book, among numerous other book development activities, she managed the award-winning Community Publishing Project and participated in the 2006 British Council sponsored Crossing Borders project. She lives in Cape Town with her partner and daughter.
Colin Cotterill was born in London. He has taught in Australia, the USA and Japan and lived for many years in Laos where he worked for non-governmental social service organisations, all the while continuing his two passions, writing and cartooning. He now writes full-time and lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he enjoys teaching graduate students, listening to jazz and riding his bike through the mountains. He won the 2009 CWA Dagger in the Library for the Dr Siri series of novels and has now written the seventh instalment, Love Songs from a Shallow Grave.
