Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet. She is the author of three collections of poetry - The Dream in the Next Body, The Museum of Ordinary Life and A hundred silences - and her poems have appeared in journals in South Africa, Europe and the US, including Fidelities, New Contrast, Carapace, Chimurenga, New Coin, Karavan, Matter, Illuminations, Sable, Sentinel and Meridians. Gabeba is the recipient of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry 2005 and held the Guest Writer Fellowship at the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden in 2005. Her debut collection, The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005), was named a Notable Book of 2005 by the Sunday Independent. The story 'High Traffic' appears in her collection The Museum of Ordinary Life and has been selected for an anthology of travel writing about Cape Town, to be published in 2007. A hundred silences was selected for Homebru 2006 by Exclusive Books in South Africa. Both The Dream in the Next Body and A hundred silences were Sunday Times Recommended Books. Gabeba has been a featured poet in the 16 Days of Activism readings with Malika Ndlovu, Diana Ferrus, Sandile Dikeni and Antjie Krog, and in festivals such as Poetry on the Road in Bremen, Weltklang in Berlin, Poetry Africa in Durban and the Stockholm Poetry Festival. For 2006, Gabeba has been invited to read at Poetry International in Rotterdam, the Bristol Poetry Festival and Poetry International on the South Bank in London. She has been invited to read in several prestigious poetry series, including the Achebe Fellowship Series at Bard College, the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series at the University of Pittsburgh, and with Cecil Giscombe in the Allegheny Series at Pennsylvania State University. She will read at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York on 15 November. In 2007 she will be a featured poet at the Spier Poetry Festival, curated by Antjie Krog. Gabeba is also a literature and media scholar and holds a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town. With Lisa Combrink and Lebo Mashile, she is an editor of the forthcoming anthology in honour of 16 Days of Activism.
A hundred silences, her third collection of poetry, explores the intimate geographies of love and loss, of leaving and remembering places. In the poems we hear the 'soft, private laugh' of lovers. Old photographs, their "scalloped edges bent then straightened", show how the past shapes us. Music and silence thread through the collection, from the love songs of Astrud Gilberto to the "long silence at the start" of a jazz song. A speaker contemplates the house her grandfather built and finds "the landscape is passing into language". A hundred silences was published by Kwela/Snailpress in April 2006.

Biographical information from http://www.gabeba.com.

Opgedateer/Updated: 2006-10-01
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#ReadingAfrica | The women's panel

Aoife Lennon-Ritchie, Gabeba Baderoon, Sifton Anipare Interviews 2021-12-14

On 10 December Aoife Lennon-Ritchie spoke to Gabeba Baderoon and Sifton Anipare about getting published, emigrating and feminism.

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