Author Archives

Robyn Sassen

A freelance arts writer since 1998, I fell in love with the theatre as a toddler, proved rubbish as a ballerina: my starring role was as Mrs Pussy in Noddy as a seven-year-old, and earned my stripes as an academic in Fine Arts and Art History, in subsequent years. I write for a range of online and print publications, including the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and artslink.co.za and was formerly the arts editor of the SA Jewish Report, a weekly newspaper with which I was associated for 16 years. I am currently a Research Associate at Wits University. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.

Home truths and the crocodile on the roof

ARE YOU — OR your children – simply bored with European fairy tales with all their pomp and circumstance, and men in Victorian-redolent powdered wigs and stockings with funny shoes, populating stories that have been told a million times and present platitudes at their most bland? Well, you […]

Dogs of war

A SKOP, SKIET en donder novel with a conservation twist, Tony Park’s freshly published Scent of Fear is a real page turner. But it takes a special kind of skill to write in the first person, as a dog. Convincingly. And Australian journalist-turned-novelist Park achieves all of this and […]

The fine art of filching sheep

YOU’VE HEARD OF the Leprechaun, the Tokoloshe, Pinky-Pinky, Kalula the rabbit and others – fictional characters that represent the trickster values in a given culture. They’re made up yet believable, feisty and quirky, naughty and a touch sinister, but they evade the structures of society and crop up […]

Whirligig of Africa in black, white

YOU MAY THINK ‘contemporary classical African art’ and immediately call to mind, bright colours, concatenating against one another in mostly geometric patterns. You’re about a third right. Challenging preconceptions about what African art looks like, Kim Sacks has curated another wonderful exhibition, focusing on the black and white […]

What if God was one of us?

A ROUGH-AROUND-THE EDGES young man, replete with a lot of bravado and a whirligig macho kind of engagement with the world, with all its women, deals and chance-taking, finds his comeuppance in a way that takes him – and will take you – by surprise. Paco Arango’s film […]