Mark Gevisser

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

After graduating from Yale in 1987 magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature, Gevisser worked in New York, writing for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990.^[1]

His work has been published in the Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Sunday Independent, The New York Review of Books, 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.

Personal Life

Mark Gevisser lives in France and South Africa. In 2009, he wrote about his marriage to his partner, a black man.^[7]

Notes

1. ^ [1]
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. ^ Gevisser, Mark (2009-07-19). "South African Rites". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19lives-t.html. Retrieved 2010-05-12. 

References

• "Mark Gevisser biography". The Times. http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Lifestyle/Article.aspx?id=782628. Retrieved 08-03-2009. 

• Gevisser, Mark (2007-12-12). "Op-ed: South Africa Grows Up". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/opinion/12gevisser.html?pagewanted=print. Retrieved 08-03-2009. 

External links

• Extract from The Dream Deferred

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