HOW DO YOU respond to a person you love deeply – have loved deeply for many years – when you know they are slipping away from you? This is the central underlying thread in The Ward, a book of photographs by Gideon Mendel published in Britain by Trolley […]
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 […]
SOMETIMES IT IS not the story of a film that grabs you by the scruff of your neck and doesn’t let go. It’s something else. It’s a thing that takes the collaborative energies that make an entity as complex as a film come together, and opens a rich […]
ANY MANIFESTATION OF the arts in the public domain involves collaborative energy, give and take, the use of others’ expertise. And the names of those people are mostly not on the headlines of the work. Ask any sub-editor, stage manager, gallery factotum or set designer. Björn Runge’s film […]
DON’T BE MISLED into thinking that the relative size of sociologist Jacklyn Cock’s latest book is indicative of its value. Clocking in at less than 200 pages, this supremely lucid text is immense and it will take you the length and depth and width of the Kowie River […]
IF YOU ARE of a certain era, you hear the name ‘Clementina van der Walt’, and think immediately of a very specific type of ceramic object which became classically the work of this South African potter in the 1990s. They were bold and kind of clunky, they featured […]
WAR. IT’S A time of cruelty and violence, of value-shifting upheaval and horrible surprises. War history, by its very nature is clustered with rich and timeless stories of hope and love. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a film based on the eponymous novel, that […]
AS YOU OPEN the first page of A Several Plot, and step into the whirligig of 16th century European society, with all its costumes and class structure, its hierarchies and ravaging illnesses, so may you be forgiven for feeling as though you’re no longer of the 21st century. […]
IT’S ONE THING to take a beautiful novel and translate it into a film which drives a similar story line. It’s quite another to parade a film under the title of said novel, but twist its ending into something else entirely. Curiously, Ian McEwan who wrote the novel […]
HE WAS THE man who gave voice to the ordinary people in South Africa, those who travel for hours in public transport, work in ignominious circumstances and earn a pittance in KwaNdebele. Not afraid to go down mine shafts, or gaze at white Afrikaners in the eye, and […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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