Begging To Be Black

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Krog, Antjie

ISBN

9781770220706

Format

Trade Paperback

Recommended Price

R350.00

Published

December 2009

About the book:

In 1992, a gang leader was shot dead by a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Kroonstad. The murder weapon was then hidden on Antjie Krog's stoep.

In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case. From there the book ranges widely in scope, both in time – reaching back to the days of Basotho king Moshoeshoe – and in space – as we follow Krog's experiences as a research fellow in Berlin, far from the Africa that produced her.

Begging to Be Black forms the third part of a trilogy that Antjie Krog (unknowingly) began with Country of My Skull and continued with A Change of Tongue.

Mixing memoir and history, philosophy and poetry, the book is stylistically experimental and personally courageous.

Begging to Be Black is a welcome addition to Krog's own oeuvre and to South African literary non-fiction.

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About the Author

Antjie Krog was born and grew up in the Free State. She became editor of the Afrikaans current-affairs magazine Die Suid-Afrikaan and later worked as a radio jounalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, all the while writing extensively for newspapers and journals. She and her radio colleagues

received the Pringle Award for excellence in journalism for their coverage of the Commission hearings, from which came the best known of her three non-fiction books, Country of My Skull.

She has won major awards in almost all the genres and media in which she has worked: poetry, non-fiction and translation. But, mainly, she has lived as a poet. Krog’s first volume of poetry was published when she was seventeen years old and she has since released thirteen volumes of poetry and received among others the Eugène Marais Prize, the Hertzog Prize, the FNB Prize, the Protea Prize, and, for non-fiction, the Alan Paton Prize and the Olive Schreiner Award. She has also been a recipient of the Stockholm Award from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture and the Open Society Prize. She is married to architect John Samuel.