Other writers

The Interpreters

in , ,

A new century of South African nonfiction.

The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction. An anthology co-edited with Sean Christie (Soutie Press, 2025).

Introduction excerpted in the Johannesburg Review of Books, 14 August 2025.

Using the term “nonfiction” (some writers of it have remarked) is about as useful as calling the clothes in your wardrobe “nonsocks”, or saying that you had “nongrapefruit” for breakfast. A broad spectrum of compelling, ambitious and artful literature shelters within that unhelpful “non”. This includes: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing in its many variants, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony – all those forms caught up in the alchemy of spoken becoming written.

Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. Collected here is the work in prose of thirty-seven authors, all of it writing (also some drawing: comics and graphic nonfiction) concerned with actual people, places and events. Actual rather than real, since a character in a novel might be powerfully real for a reader, even when invented or imaginary. Fiction in the first person can, after all, impersonate every technique known to autobiography (and has often done so, right back to the beginnings of the novel). Whereas (the other side of the coin) writing about a real- life person does not guarantee that the subject will come to life, or be realised, on the page.

So when and why does this happen? How is it that human beings become vital, vivid and (see Lin Sampson’s portrait of bouncer, breker and photographer Billy Monk) indelible via words? When does nonfiction become not just a way of delivering information but an artform in its own right?

Read More

Light and Time

in
79332154_10156405076892016_9204944634290110464_n.jpg

By Anna Hartford.

Kenyon Review, September 2019.

This is a photograph of my parents from 1988. I saw it for the first time some years ago. A friend of my father’s had uncovered a spool of undeveloped negatives, mostly of my sister and I as girls. In this photo, which was among them, my mother is visiting my father at the COSATU offices in Johannesburg, where he was working at the time. ‘It looks like you’ve been split in two!’ a friend in America wrote to me, after I sent it to her. I was sending it to everyone. Proud to have these cool parents: this woman in her Annie Hall get-up; this man jamming on the floor beside her. Finally, I showed it to my mother, who responded in her familiar deadpan: ‘Dirk pretending to play the bass guitar, and me pretending to be happy.

It’s true. My father can’t really play the bass guitar, and my mother can’t really be happy. She can be many other things though: this acerbic and mischievous, but secretly devout woman. My mother is rigorously unsentimental about photographs. She has never owned a camera. She has kept almost no photographs of her own parents, her siblings, or herself as a child. For the most part I haven’t known these people and now I have no faces for them either. Often I forget their names. Sometimes I misspell her surname. I can’t really speak Afrikaans, her first language. She set out to erase her past from me, and she succeeded, and yet sometimes she seems wounded by her success: that this seemingly immutable lineage was not innate, after all; that it could disappear, just like that, by a simple practice of omission.

Full essay
https://www.annahartford.com/writing

A Writer's Diary

in
fullsizerender3.jpg

Relaunching a minor classic of South African writing.

Address by Tanya Wilson at the Book Lounge | 26 August.

Casting an eye over the titles of papers to be delivered at an academic conference in English studies: I wonder whether the authors of almost all these papers do not feel that deep, if secret, shame that comes from recognizing that they are a mere chorus-line dancing to the tune of someone else's music and choreography. I am reminded, in short, of those occasions when I felt myself to be someone who has failed in that primal obligation: to be an autonomous human being. And the almost ontological sense of guilt that goes with it.

Stephen Watson, A Writer's Diary. 8 April 1996.

On the Brink of the Mundane

in , ,
On the Brink of the Mundane

Rereading Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket and Double Negative.

(Much) shorter version at the New Statesman, 9 January 2015: Lost in Joburg: One of South Africa's most accomplished prose stylists gets a timely reissue.

Do copy-editors still use their time-honoured signs: the confident slashes, STETs and arrowheads, the fallen-down S that means transpose? Or is everything now done via the garish bubbles of MS Word Track changes?

Midway through Ivan Vladislavić’s 2001 novel The Restless Supermarket, the proudly anachronistic narrator Aubrey Tearle gives a disquisition on the delete mark. As a retired proofreader, regular writer of letters to the editor, and grumpy but occasionally endearing old man, he suggests that of all his erstwhile profession’s charms, this is the most beautiful and mysterious:

Read More

I and I

in ,
I and I

Meeting Geoff Dyer.

Edited version published in the Mail&Guardian, 23 December 2014.

Can I use ‘I’ in my essays? The question, often asked by first-year literature students, isolates the problem succinctly. The first I in the sentence means me, the special, singular, irreplaceable self; the second is a devious linguistic particle: a shifty, worn-out pronoun forced on us all the moment we enter language. And the perilous thing about book festivals is that they tend to collapse the two. The I who has been flown out to Cape Town and given a name-tag is now asked to answer for, or ‘speak to’, the I on the page.

In this case, Geoff Dyer, with whom I sat chatting during the Open Book festival in September this year while we waited for a panel on ‘The Art of the Essay’ to begin – a bit like TV newsreaders used to before or after the bulletin. I told him that he was one of only two people I had ever written a fan letter to (the other was Terry Pratchett, but I was ten years old then). I asked him if he actually enjoyed going to literary festivals, being interviewed, the whole scene. ‘I can honestly say’, he replied, ‘that the only reason I write any more is to be invited to literary festivals’.

Read More

Index

in
1d14e3752916e6160b15aef3532e01df.jpg

Found poem

I always suspected the city was a falsification
I arrived too late
I bought it from a street vendor in Naples
I cannot find the title
I cannot remember
I can still adjust the devotional picture so your reconciliation with necessity may be known
I couldn't choose
I did not learn this today
I don't know who (who the hell)
I bequeath to the four elements
I don't understand how you can write poems about the moon

I Gave My Word
I have never believed in the spirit of history
I just close my eyes

The Life of the Mine

in ,
The Life of the Mine

Remembering Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)

Business Day, 22 July 2014.

‘Responsibility’, wrote Nadine Gordimer in one of her most important essays, ‘is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity’. As the many tributes to her over the last week have shown, this was a writer who took such responsibilities seriously. Always ready to be in the intellectual thick of it – whether involved with the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Writers during the struggle, or opposing ANC-led bills limiting public access to information toward the end of her life – Gordimer was a model citizen of the Republic of Letters if ever there was one. The move from ‘creative self-absorption’ to ‘conscionable awareness’ is the essential gesture that gives the essay its title and the oeuvre its extraordinary social and historical breadth.

But what about the second half of that sentence? What was unique, strange and private about her work? What exactly was the nature of that enclosed and fertile space – ‘the Eden of creativity’ – that made her the writer she was?

Read More

Thief and Dispatcher

in ,
Thief and Dispatcher

Review of Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief and Mark Gevisser, Dispatcher.

New Statesman, 13-19 June, 2014.

Lagos and Johannesburg: the two big, bad economic powerhouses of the African continent, neck and neck at the top of the GDP charts. Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole andDispatcher by Mark Gevisser are meditations on each city, respectively: one slim and spare; one garrulous and super­abundant. Both are eagerly awaited follow-ups to highly acclaimed works, and each must face the challenges created by second-album syndrome.

Thief reads as a deliberately minor after­word to the literary hit of Open City (like Kid A after OK Computer) – but this Faber edition is in fact a remastered version of a book first published in 2007 by Cassava Press, the Nigerian imprint. That same year brought Gevisser’s monumental biography of the then South African president, Thabo Mbeki, The Dream Deferred. His Joburg memoir, Dispatcher, takes the other option for follow-up albums: the hyper-ambitious, super-produced, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach. Yet these two city books are linked by an inquiry into the mysterious ways in which the spaces of our early lives come to structure imagination, creativity, the self – and what happens when these primal attachments must weather disaffection, estrangement and violence.

Read More