The Participant & the Observer

As we continue to celebrate the release of our latest issue, Granta 114: Aliens, tonight the magazine’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey will lead a discussion with contributors Mark Gevisser and Dinaw Mengestu.

Mark Gevisser is a renowned South African journalist; Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethopian-born novelist raised in the USA. The two writers will discuss the role of the writer with a focus on the question, ‘Participant or observer?’ What happens when the writer becomes a part of the story he is relating?
Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society, will introduce the evening.

– 6.30 p.m., Brunei Suite SOAS, London WC1H 0XG

Mark Gevisser

Mark Gevisser is well known for his biography of Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second democratically-elected president. His piece in ‘Aliens’ covers more personal territory. It is a portrait of two of his acquaintances, older black gay men from Soweto. Married with families in the townships and ‘fishing’ for partners in Johannesburg, these men’s double lives reflect something of the country’s own political history. Yet the piece is also a commemoration of an intimate and very particular underground culture that could only thrive in apartheid South Africa.

Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu has written two award-winning novels, Children of the Revolution and How to Read the Air, and was chosen last summer as one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40. He has also reported on the war in Darfur for Rolling Stone and on the conflict in Uganda for Jane. ‘They Always Come In the Night’, from the latest issue of our magazine, brought him to Walikale, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most troubled territory. Mengestu calls it ‘a place as awash in natural wealth as it is in armed groups [...] who have wreaked a collective havoc on a population living in what could be an Edenic corner of the earth.’ There, he attempts to find the truth about the FDLR, the elusive Rwandan Hutu militia group that continues to terrorize the region.

See also ... Contacts: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s photo essay from the issue, plus a special podcast on our artwork.

Visit our events page for a full list of readings and launch parties over the coming weeks – in England, the USA, Canada and Paris.