Litnet

Denis Hirson was born in 1951 and lived in South Africa until the age of 22. He is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he studied Social Anthropology, and the University of East Anglia, where he obtained a doctorate in Creative Writing in 2004. Since 1975, he has lived in France, where he has worked as an actor and lectured in English at the Ecole Polytechnique. He has published nine books in his own name. The house next door to Africa, I remember King Kong (the Boxer), We walk straight so you better get out the way, White scars, Gardening in the dark, The dancing and the death on Lemon Street and My thirty-minute bar mitzvah are all concerned in one way or another with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa. Worlds in one country is a brief historical survey of South African writing from the nineteenth century to 1994. Ma langue au chat, written in French, is about the delights and difficulties of speaking that language.

He is the editor, with Martin Trump, of The Heinemann book of South African short stories (Heinemann, 1994); he is editor of The lava of this land: South African poetry 1960-1996 (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and its sister volume, In the heat of shadows: South African poetry 1996-2013 (Deep South, 2014); and he has translated into English a selection of Breyten Breytenbach’s poetry as In Africa even the flies are happy (John Calder, 1978). He has also published a book of conversations with William Kentridge, Footnotes for the panther (Fourth Wall, 2017).

His work has been translated into French, Italian, German and Swedish. In 2007, White scars was runner-up for the Alan Paton Prize, the first book of literary analysis to achieve this distinction.