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FAVOURITE BIOGRAPHIES

Christopher Hope, Elinor Sisulu, Maxine Case, Beverly Rycroft and Anwar Mall

A well-written biography can have a lasting impact on its reader, providing insight, inspiration and even career guidance. In this course, four writers (including two biographers) and a bibliophile biochemistry professor discuss their favourite biographies. Novelist Christopher Hope takes on Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; Elinor Sisulu lectures on Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer, the biography of pioneering African American scientist Margaret Lawrence; novelist Maxine Case turns her attention to Lady Anne Barnard; Beverley Rycroft delves into a controversial life as she discusses Janet Malcolm's biography of Sylvia Plath, and Anwar Mall shares the story of Marie Curie which set him off on a lifetime of medical research.

LECTURE TITLES

1. Vladimir Nabokov Christopher Hope

2. Margaret Lawrence Elinor Sisulu

3. Lady Anne Barnard Maxine Case

4. Sylvia Plath Beverly Rycroft

5. Marie Curie Emeritus Professor Anwar Mall

Recommended reading

Curie, E. 2007. Marie Curie. New York: Doubleday.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S.M. 1995. Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer. New York: Penguin.

Malcolm, J. 1994. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. London: Granta.

Nabokov, V. 2012. Speak, Memory: an autobiography revisited. London: Penguin.

Taylor, S. 2017. Defiance: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Anne Barnard. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Date: 7–11 January

Time: 1.00 pm

COURSE FEES Full: R550,00 Staff and Students R275,00

Venue: LT3 Kramer Law Building UCT

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels and one collection of short stories, including Kruger’s Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, My Mother’s Lovers and Shooting Angels, published by Atlantic Books in 2012 to great acclaim. He is also a poet, playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running (1988).

Zimbabwean-born South African writer Elinor Sisulu is the author of the Noma Award-winning biography about her parents-in-law Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In our Lifetime (2002) and The Day Gogo Went to Vote, a children’s book about South Africa’s first democratic election. She is currently the Executive Director of the Puku Children’s Literature Foundation, a book development and reading promotion organisation that runs the puku.co.za website.

Maxine Case’s first novel, All We Have Left Unsaid, was awarded the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa) and was the joint winner of the Herman Charles Bosman Prize. Her second book, a biography titled Papwa: Golf’s Lost Legend, was shortlisted for the 2016 Alan Paton Award. Maxine’s second novel, Softness of the Lime, was shortlisted for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2018. She has been named an honorary fellow in writing by the University of Iowa, Hong Kong Baptist University, and City of Asylum/Pittsburgh.

Beverly Rycroft is a graduate of UCT and Wits. She taught English for several years before turning to writing full-time. She has won the Thomas Pringle Award for an individual poem, and the 2012 Ingrid Jonker award for her debut poetry collection, missing (Modjaji). Her first novel, A Slim, Green Silence, (Umuzi) was published in 2015. Her second poetry collection, A Private Audience, was published by Dryad Press in 2017.

Anwar Suleman Mall is a retired Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town. He is a Medical Biochemist by training and was the Professor of Surgical Research in the Division of General Surgery, managing a research laboratory for the training of postgraduate students. Mall also taught Medical Biochemistry to medical students as part of an Academic Support Programme and was a warden of one or other UCT residence for almost three decades. In 2015-6, Mall was Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Student Affairs and transformation at UCT.

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