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Letter from CapetownFebruary 1997 The silence in South Africa: writers chuck it in by Sarah Ruden On the state of literature in South Africa Peter Horn is a poet and critic who spent decades in outspoken opposition to apartheid. His fights with the establishment in the universities, his patronage of young black writers, and the total publication ban under which he worked for a time evoked so much domestic and international sympathy as to make the quality of his writing--and he happened to write extremely well—irrelevant. His academic reputation was comfortable, and he received actual— even literal—acclaim. He remembers poetry readings at political rallies, with cheering audiences of several thousand. Now he is thinking of emigrating. Part of his frustration has been the five-year wait for prize money owed him by a writers’ organization which moved mostly on political energy and is now stumbling like a wino. J. M. Coetzee is one of Horn’s colleagues on the faculty of the University of Cape Town. Some of Coetzee’s novels are set in apart ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 15 February 1997, on page 35 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-silence-in-South-Africa--writers-chuck-it-in-3390
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A common what?: the limits of reconciliation by Sarah Ruden On the Christian-Muslim "A Common Word Between Us and You" at Yale.
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