Mark Gevisser

Mark Gevisser (born November 11, 1964 ) is a South African journalist, non-fiction and screenwriter.

Gevisser studied at Yale and completed his comparative studies in 1984 with magna cum laude . He worked as a journalist for The Village Voice and The Nation . In 1990 he returned to his home country South Africa.

Together with the judge and AIDS activist Edwin Cameron , he wrote the non-fiction book Defiant Desire in 1994 about gay and lesbian life in South Africa. He wrote the script and produced the documentary The Man Who Drove with Mandela . The film tells the story of the white gay Johannesburg theater director Cecil Williams , who tried to smuggle Nelson Mandela back to Johannesburg disguised as his chauffeur in 1962 . The documentary won the Teddy Award at the Berlinale in 1999 .

Gevisser is best known as the biographer of the former South African President Thabo Mbeki , about whom he wrote numerous newspaper articles and two books. His Mbeki biography The Dream Deferred won the Alan Paton Award in 2008 . He works as a journalist for various domestic and foreign newspapers and as a foreign correspondent for The Nation . In 2009 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Pretoria , where he taught journalism.

Gevisser lives with his partner in France and South Africa.

Awards

• 2008: Alan Paton Award for Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred

Works

• Defiant Desire, Gay and Lesbian Lives In South Africa. Routledge, 1994.
• Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa. David Philip, 1996.
• Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. Jonathan Ball, 2007.
• A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Lost and Found in Johannesburg. A memoir. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014.
• The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020.

Movies

• 1999: The Man Who Drove with Mandela

Web links

• official page
• Mark Gevisser in the Internet Movie Database (English)