Achmat Dangor is a South African writer was born in Johannesburg in 1948, the year the Nationalist Party, whose works include Kafka's Curse and Bitter Fruit. He currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland with his wife, Audrey, and young son Zak.
Dangor is more interested in the balance between the intensely personal and the external influences in a relationship, the effects of religion (and its prescriptions), as well as society (apartheid law for instance) on relationships and marriage.
At first Dangor presents her as a liberating force in the lives of the men who have been close to her, but in the end it is clear that all is not well with her.
Dangor seems not to celebrate the extraordinary mutations of cross-cultural life in the late 20th century, but creates a fantastical world for those who have lost the (true?) path.
Dangor says about himself, I write because I have to and because I love to; it is the closest I am to having an obsession." and has committed himself to politics with the same fervor.
In the 80s Dangor, one of the cofounders of the South African Writers Congress, started to publish books in South Africa which were translated into five languages: short stories, books of poetry and to date three novels, one of which Kafkas Curse"(1997) was published in German under the title Kafkas Fluch"(2001).
Dangor was the director of the Nelson Mandela Childrens Fund until the end 2001 and since then has lived in Johannesburg and New York, where his wife works for the United Nations.
Feeds |
Contact