Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-265). / Fractured Lives is a non-fiction work. Part autobiography, part history, part social comment and part war story, it covers a 15 year period, from the early 1980’s to the mid 1990’s when I was making documentaries about the wars taking place in the Southern African region. The films were not about Africa or war, so much as about the effect of war on people’s lives, especially those of women and children. Fractured Lives draws on the experience of making the films, using the stories of people who appear in them. It is my view of what we experienced during those journeys and I drive the narrative, although it is more about the people and places I was filming than about me. I have called it Fractured Lives because the lives of many people I filmed were destroyed almost beyond understanding.

Includes bibliographical references. / This collection of 47 poems, Questions for the Sea, explores questions pertaining to the frailty of human existence within the natural and built environment. Many of the poems involve some form of human exposure, and subsequent response, to the e.ects of the natural elements. The presence of the ocean, whether obvious or nuanced, is o.ered to the reader as a constant; and serves as a point of entry or departure, and even inquiry, for the poems. The collection is divided into nine sections which encompass themes including landscape, natural topographies, specific localities within South Africa, inter-personal relationships, and aspects of human conflict, both historical and contemporary. Of special interest to the poet, are the visual properties of the poem’s form on paper, as well as its association with poetic style and narrative function.

Through unfolding, fragmentary memoirs, the disconnected odyssey of Nick Numbers, a rock music critic working in London and LA through the 1970s into the early 1980s, Rock & Roll explores the multiple realities that exist between documentary, documentable fact and supposedly pure fiction. Real people and verifiable occurrences are interwoven with invented characters and situations in a way that blurs any clear distinction between the two. The book also sees how the power of additions such as images and footnotes can add, or perhaps undermine, authority and credibility to a story. Meanwhile, stories connect the twin musical and lyrical strands, black rhythm and blues and the writings of the Beat generation, that somehow merged in the mid-1960s to produce rock music. They play with the self-imposed otherness of the self-defined rebel, and how this normalises behaviour that would be unacceptable outside the bubble of exemption. They connect, in passing, Nick Numbers' odyssey with earlier models, Homer, Joyce, C.P. Cavafy and Richard Fariña, heroic, anti-heroic and mock-heroic. And they grapple with the very nature of storytelling itself, the relationship between the storyteller and the story, between the storyteller and the audience, something that goes right back to an essential distinction between Homer, the bard, and Odysseus, the teller of tales who gets to relate his own remarkable, perhaps even incredible, adventures. In a world of truthiness, of alternative facts, a post-factual world, how can fiction respond to increasingly abstract or, perhaps, simply cynical notions of truth and veracity? If the real world can cut its facts from whole cloth to suit the needs of the occasion, where does that leave the storyteller? If the role of any artist or creator, as Hamlet says of playing, is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, one response is to reflect and highlight the untrustworthiness of everything. Rock & Roll does not merely have an unreliable narrator, it explores an unreliable world. The book is followed by "Why I Write What I Write," a self-reflective, or reflexive essay that explores the route I took to start writing it.

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Settling is a collection of poems that interrogates the location of self in the physical, personal and metaphorical worls. There are thirty poems that explore different aspects of 'settling' from a woman's perspective.

Miranda Friend, a therapist at a Cape Town psychiatric hospital, wants to reverse herself from the cul-de-sac of her life. At thirty, she is in a dead-end relationship and is working in a hospital which is struggling under new management.

Includes abstract. / At face value, The Seed Thief is a contemporary quest story. Maddy Bellani, a botanist with the Millennium Seed Bank in Cape Town, is sent on the trail of an African plant thought to be extinct on the continent, and believed to be growing in Brazil.

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Includes bibliographical references. / As a young boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Robins was haunted by an old postcard-size photograph of three unknown women on the mantelpiece. Only later did he learn that the women were his father’s mother and sisters, photographed in Berlin in 1937, before they were killed in the Holocaust. Having changed his name from Robinski to Robins, Steven’s father communicated nothing about his European past, and he said nothing about his flight from Nazi Germany or the fate of his family who remained there, until Steven, now a young anthropologist, interviewed him in the year before he died. Steven became obsessed with finding out what happened to the women in the photograph, but the information from his father was scant. The first breakthrough came when he discovered facts about their fates in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the Landesarchiv in Berlin, and the second when he discovered over a hundred letters sent to his father and uncle from the family in Berlin from 1936 to 1943. Steven was finally able to read the words of the women who before had been unnamed faces in a photograph. Letters of Stone tracks Steven’s journey of discovery about the lives and fates of the Robinski family. It is also a book about geographical journeys: to the Karoo town of Williston, where his father’s uncle settled in the late nineteenth century and became mayor; to Berlin, where Steven laid ‘Stumbling Stones’ (Stolpersteine) in commemoration of his family who were victims of the Holocaust; to Auschwitz, where his father’s siblings perished. It also explores the complicity of Steven’s discipline of anthropology through the story of Eugen Fischer, who studied the “Basters” who moved from the Karoo to Rehoboth in German South West Africa, providing the foundation for Nazi racial science; through the ways in which a mixture of nationalism and eugenics resulted in Jews being refused entry to South Africa and other countries in the 1930s; and via disturbing discoveries concerning the discipline of Volkekunde (Ethnology) at Steven’s own university Stellenbosch. Most of all, this book is a poignant reconstruction of a family trapped in an increasingly terrifying and deadly Nazi state, and about the immense pressure on Steven’s father in faraway South Africa, which forced him to retreat into silence.

No description available.