Posted inEqualityNews/Politics

Let them eat cake

This morning I crawled off an overnight flight from Paris, gave thanks for unlimited bandwidth, and started scrolling through Twitter. There I found an opinion piece by Peter Delmar on the Times Live site. I paused to read it because he had obviously been to Paris for a family holiday, just as I had. I […]

Posted inEqualityMedia

White writers writing black characters – a form of literary blackface?

White South African writers who create black characters are often challenged about the authenticity of their writing. If their main protagonist is black, this challenge intensifies, and if they write in the first person, it intensifies further. There is something particularly intimate about first-person narrative. It gets under the skin of the character in a […]

Posted inLifestyle

Local erotic fiction goes global

In the same week that South Africa’s first mainstream erotic novel for women hit shelves, a major publishing deal was announced that is poised to take local erotica worldwide. There are those who chose to link these two events with the horrific rape and murder of Anene Booysen — the implication being that women’s erotic […]

Posted inLifestyle

Put Nigella down

Cookbooks are a perennial favourite at Christmas time. They are as much fun to give as to receive because the giver stands a good chance of being invited over for dinner to try out a new recipe. We all like to be thought of as the kind of person who has an inner gourmet just […]