Malcolm Ray, author of Free Fall and The Tyranny of Growth, is devoted to breaking down walls of silence. A multi-award-winning journalist, his writing is unapologetic and irreverent and deals directly with themes of power hierarchies, race and gender discrimination, and class inequality. His protagonists are often but not exclusively the poor and discarded communities.
Ray began his career as an anti-apartheid activist during the 1980s and early nineties, when he developed a habit of independent but critical thinking. He practiced journalism for more than a decade before becoming a financial magazine editor in the early 2000s. Jaded by the rise of ‘soundbite’ journalism, the general decline in the quality of news and rising disinformation and misinformation in media, he moved on and made his way into academia as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg before succumbing, eventually, to the magnetic appeal of his first love, creative writing. Now he strives in his writing to integrate complex issues, recognising that news emerges from multiple actors in multifaceted social, political, economic and institutional settings.
