Quick Facts
Biography
Mark Gevisser (born 1964) is a South African author and journalist best known for his biography of Thabo Mbeki, his country's second democratically elected president.
Early life
Mark Gevisser was born in 1964 in South Africa. He graduated from Yale University in 1987 magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature.
Career
Gevisser started his career in New York, where he worked for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990. Over the years, his work has been published in the Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Sunday Independent, The New York Times Magazine, The Observer, The Guardian and The New York Times.
Gevisser's book on the South African president, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, won the 2008 Alan Paton Award; his political profiles were collected as Portraits of Power: Profiles in a New South Africa, published in 1996; and he co-edited Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa with Edwin Cameron. An abridged version of the Mbeki biography, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, was published in 2009, with an epilogue briefly detailing Mbeki's usurpation at the hands of Jacob Zuma. Composed over the course of more than a decade spent tracking Mbeki and studying the course of his life in the struggle against apartheid, the book takes a mixed view of its subject, deploring, for instance, his policies on Zimbabwe (with his "quiet diplomacy" and refusal to condemn Robert Mugabe) and HIV/AIDS (the latter of which may, according to a Harvard study, directly have resulted in 330,000 deaths, and which cost the author several friends "who saw, in any attempt at empathy, a collusion in genocide"), and praising his canny diplomacy and cool-headed management of the negotiations of the early 1990s.
Gevisser's book Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.
Personal life
Gevisser lives in France and South Africa. In 2009, in Edenvale, Gauteng, South Africa, he married Dhianaraj Chetty, who works for UNESCO.[1]