About Mark Gevisser

Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa’s leading journalists. After graduating from Yale University in 1987 magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature, he worked in New York, writing for the Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990.

In South Africa, his work has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Times and many magazines and periodicals. Internationally, he has published widely on South African politics, culture and society, in publications ranging from Vogue and the New York Times to Foreign Affairs and Art in America. In 2001 he won a Mondi award for his series of articles in GQ on cities and space in South Africa.

Mark has previously published two books – Defiant Desire, Gay and Lesbian Lives In South Africa (Routledge, 1994), which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron, and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa (David Philip, 1996), a collection of his celebrated political profiles from the Mail & Guardian. He has also published widely, in anthologies, on sexuality and on urbanism in South Africa. His essay, “Inheritance”, appears in the award-winning anthology, Beautiful/Ugly (Duke/Kwela, 2006). His feature-length documentary, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, made with Greta Schiller, has been broadcast internationally, and won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999. The film is an excavation of the life of Cecil Williams, the South African gay communist theatre director. Mark has also written scripts for the South African drama series Zero Tolerance; his scripts were short-listed for SAFTA and iEmmy awards.

Since 2002, Mark has also been involved in heritage development. He served on Education Minister Kader Asmal’s Ministerial Committee on History in 2002; he co-led the team that developed the heritage, education and tourism components of Constitution Hill, and co-curated the Hill’s permanent exhibitions. He is a founder and partner of trace, heritage research and design company; his clients include GALA, for whom he is currently curating an exhibition on the history of gay and lesbian people in Johannesburg.

His biography of former South African president Thabo Mbeka, Thabo Mbeki: The dream deferred, was much acclaimed. His most recent book is Lost and Found in Johannesburg.

Mark lives in Johannesburg and in Cape Town with his partner.