Author Profile
CHRISTOPHER HOPE
 CHRISTOPHER
HOPE was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is a graduate of
Wits
University. His first collection of poems, Cape Drives, published in
1974, won the Cholmondeley Award. His first novel, A Separate
Development, was published in 1980 and immediately banned in
South
Africa. It was awarded the David Higham Prize for Best First Novel in
1982.
He is the author of seven novels,
including Kruger’s Alp,
which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, and Serenity House, shortlisted for the
1992 Booker Prize. Since 1975, when he first went
abroad, he has travelled extensively in the former Soviet Union, in
Moscow, and Eastern Europe, and spent time in ex-Yugoslavia during ,
and after, the civil wars that tore that country apart and wrote about
these travels for journals as diverse as The Guardian (on the Balkan
wars) and The New Republic (for
which he described, at first hand, the
fall of the Berlin Wall).
His celebrated memoir White
Boy Running
(1988) received the CNA Award. He has contributed essays, reports and
stories to The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The New
Yorker and Le Monde.
His series of linked stories, The
Love
Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky,
1993, a dozen stories set in Johannesburg of the 50’s, was
commissioned for broadcast by the BBC. His most recent novel
is My Mother’s Lovers (2006)
Christopher
Hope describes himself as a wandering South African. He has travelled
widely in South East Asia, and reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos
and Burma and his portrait of Hanoi won the Travelex Travel Writer
Award in 1997. In 2003 he wrote and presented ‘Stranger at
the
Gate’, a BBC TV documentary on the work of JM Coetzee.
He
lives in France but he spends three to four months travelling in South
Africa each year, and has written about people and places from Soweto
at the height of its resistance to apartheid, to the Afrikaner enclave
of Orania. He is fascinated above all by the perversities and
absurdities and cruelties of power, by what happens to those who wield
it, and to those who endure its effects. And his interests in
dictatorship, from ex-Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe, led to Brothers Under The
Skin – Travels In Tyranny, published in 2003. He was a
Visiting
Fellow in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Cape
Town in 2002 and 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature.
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