Award-winning South African writer Kevin Bloom is the author of Ways of Staying, a journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined. From the murder of the author’s cousin in 2006, to the hills of Zululand after the death of historian David Rattray, from the fateful ruling party showdown at Polokwane in 2007, to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, it is a book that goes behind the headlines and into the marrow of a strange and troubled land. Do South Africa’s whites ‘deserve’ to feel at home in their own country? How does a white person assume a South African identity that acknowledges the past and takes responsibility for the compromised present? Is there a way that the white ‘I’ and black ‘other’ can talk outside, or around, the past?
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David Downes is Emeritus Professor at the Mannheim Centre for the Study of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the London School of Economics. He specialises in theories of crime and delinquency, comparative sentencing and penal policy, and crime and the labour market.
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Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet; the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers; White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award; The Promise of Happiness, winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, and, most recently, the acclaimed The Song Before It Is Sung, winner of the London Jewish Cultural Award for literature. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.
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Ellah Allfrey is deputy editor of Granta magazine. She was previously senior editor at Jonathan Cape and has edited Cape authors such as Carmen Callil and Julian Barnes, as well as commissioning the likes of Dinaw Mengestu and Evie Wyld. She is also responsible for Cape's list of young African writers. She tells FiveBooks about a Jesuit in space and how all our mothers might be part Chinese…
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A graduate of Cornell University and NYU, Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (2009), has been widely praised and his short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. He lives in Washington, New Jersey, and today he tells the browser that the egg roll is now as American as apple pie.
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Georgina Godwin is a journalist and broadcaster now based in London. She is the founder of NicoPipe Ltd and in her home town of Harare, Zimbabwe, she was for 10 years presenter of the prime time Good Morning Show for Radio 1 of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, and the inaugural presenter of AM Zimbabwe, the first breakfast television show in the country. She is a co-founder of the Harare International Festival of the Arts, Hifa.
She talks to The Browser about the country’s disintegration and about the experience of being a white African.
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