Memoir and Reportage: An African Perspective

When: Saturday, May 3
Where: Tinker Auditorium, The French Institute Alliance Française: 55 East 59th St.
What time: 1:30–2:30 p.m.

With Alexandra Fuller, Rian Malan, and Anderson Tepper

Tickets: $12/$8 PEN/FIAF members and students

Tickets are now available by fax or in person through FIAF’s box office. Tickets will also be available beginning March 29 through Ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.com or (212) 307-4100.

Cosponsored by the French Institute Alliance Française

Rian Malan’s 1990 testimonial, My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, Tribe, and His Conscience, was an instant classic: a book that captured the national bloodlust and hysteria—and Malan’s own troubled soul searching—in the final, violent days of apartheid. Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, was groundbreaking in its own right: a relentless, wide-eyed account of Fuller’s childhood in 1970s Rhodesia, as both the country and her family were threatening to collapse. Join us for a conversation with two of southern Africa’s most original voices as they discuss the mix of memoir and reportage that has fueled their work from the fall of apartheid and Zimbabwe’s war of liberation to the eras of Mandela, Mbeki, and Mugabe.

From the PEN Blogs

• Anne Landsman
There was nothing neutral about watching fellow white southern Africans – one who lives in the U.S. and one who lives in South Africa – talk about their powerful, groundbreaking memoirs…[More]