Mark Gevisser

Mark Gevisser (born 1964) is a South African author and journalist best known for his biography of Thabo Mbeki, his country's second democratically elected president.

Mark Gevisser
Born1964
South Africa
Alma materYale University
OccupationJournalist
Spouse(s)Dhianaraj Chetty

Early life

Mark Gevisser was born in 1964 in South Africa. He graduated from Yale University in 1987 magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature.

Career

Gevisser started his career in New York, where he worked for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990.[1] Over the years, his work has been published in the Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Sunday Independent, The New York Times Magazine, The Observer, The Guardian[2] and The New York Times.[3]

Gevisser's book on the South African president, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, won the 2008 Alan Paton Award; his political profiles were collected as Portraits of Power: Profiles in a New South Africa, published in 1996; and he co-edited Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa with Edwin Cameron.[4] An abridged version of the Mbeki biography, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, was published in 2009, with an epilogue briefly detailing Mbeki's usurpation at the hands of Jacob Zuma. Composed over the course of more than a decade spent tracking Mbeki and studying the course of his life in the struggle against apartheid, the book takes a mixed view of its subject, deploring, for instance, his policies on Zimbabwe (with his "quiet diplomacy" and refusal to condemn Robert Mugabe) and HIV/AIDS (the latter of which may, according to a Harvard study, directly have resulted in 330,000 deaths,[5] and which cost the author several friends "who saw, in any attempt at empathy, a collusion in genocide"[6]), and praising his canny diplomacy and cool-headed management of the negotiations of the early 1990s.

Gevisser's book Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir was published in 2014. It was among the finalists for that year's Jan Michalski Prize.

Books
  • Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa (David Philip, 1996, ISBN 9780864863140)
  • Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2007, ISBN 9781868423019)
    • Abridged version: A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream (St. Martin's Press, 2009, ISBN 9780230611009)
  • Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, ISBN 9780374176761)
  • The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, ISBN 9780374279967)

Personal life

Gevisser lives in France and South Africa. In 2009, in Edenvale, Gauteng, South Africa, he married Dhianaraj Chetty, who works for UNESCO.[7][8][9]

Notes
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 31 May 2009. Retrieved 17 July 2009.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. The Times(1)
  3. New York Times(1)
  4. The Times(1)
  5. Gevisser, Mark. A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream. 1st Edition. Edited by Luba Ostashevsky. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 277.
  6. Gevisser 2009, p. 6.
  7. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/hiv-and-aids/about-us/whos-who/
  8. Mckay, Robert (22 February 2010). "Much More Than a Piece of Paper". The Johannesburg Times. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
  9. Gevisser, Mark (19 July 2009). "South African Rites". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 May 2010.

References
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