Litnet

"If 'corrupted' in his title seems like an exaggeration, read the book. It is soul-destroying to see such evidence of institutions that ought to be custodians of the highest standards in civil society being so susceptible to looting, extortion, fraud, bullying, even assassinations. Many of our universities are in the same state as the most beleaguered of our municipalities and state-owned enterprises."

"My thirty-minute bar mitzvah raises awkward questions around the genre of political memoir in South Africa, which has tended to celebrate 'the insistent, long-distance, sweet-as-blood siren-call of the Struggle'."

Listen to a podcast of the discussion, see photos of the launch and read the text of David Attwell’s introduction at the Exclusive Books launch of A library to flee at the Cape Town Waterfront on 9 November 2022. 

In the sixth episode of his podcast series Full particulars, David Attwell discusses JM Coetzee's enigmatic Jesus trilogy with Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), Derek Attridge (University of York), and Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford). With a reading from The death of Jesus by JM Coetzee.

"Even if it doesn’t feel like we live in a rights-based constitutional democracy with equal access to the law and to the free exchange of ideas, which is what universities are for, we have no option but to continue to believe and act as if we do. Perhaps that explains his determination to hold on to the idea that people can and should do better. It’s part of his belief in the university as an institution."

In this, the fifth episode of his monthly podcast series, David Attwell talks to Zakes Mda about his latest, and possibly his last, novel. 

In this episode of his monthly podcast David Attwell talks to Mphuthumi Ntabeni about his tour de force, The Wanderers (2021). Ntabeni’s first novel, The Broken River Tent (2017) won the UJ Prize for debut fiction.

"An island is an ethically driven and formally accomplished novel."

In this episode of his monthly podcast David Attwell talks to Margie Orford about crime writing and her Clare Hart series of crime novels, which ended with the publication of Water Music in 2013.

"The promise is a major achievement, fully deserving its place on the Man Booker Prize longlist."

In this second episode of David Attwell’s monthly podcast, Full particulars, David hosts Elleke Boehmer and Carrol Clarkson in discussion of the South as a place of literary imagining. Guest appearance by Antjie Krog.  

In this first episode of David Attwell's monthly podcast, Full particulars, David hosts Zoë Wicomb reading from her new novel, Still life (Umuzi, 2020) and discusses historical (meta)fiction with Andrew van der Vlies, professor of English at the University of Adelaide.