Photo credit: Nick White
SISONKE MSIMANG
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: Sisonke Msimang is a writer and columnist with the Daily Maverick in South Africa. She has held fellowships at Yale University, the Aspen Institute and the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg. She was born in Swaziland to parents who were political exiles, and raised in Zambia, Kenya and Canada, before going to the US as an undergraduate. Her family returned to South Africa after the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of liberation movements in the early 1990s. She currently lives on planes, navigating the distance between South Africa and Australia. Sisonke is a 2022 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow.
THE RESURRECTION OF WINNIE MANDELA
Biography, 160 pages
Jonathan Ball, Nov 2018
The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela charts the rise and fall—and rise, again—of one of South Africa’s most controversial political figures. ‘Ma Winnie’ fought apartheid with uncommon ferocity, but her implication in kidnapping, torture and killings—including the murder of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei—would later see her shunned. Sisonke Msimang argues that this complicated woman was not witch but warrior: that her violence, like that of the men she fought alongside, was a function of her political views rather than a descent into madness. In resurrecting Ma Winnie, Msimang asks what it means to reclaim this powerful woman as an icon while honouring apartheid’s victims—those who were collateral damage and whose stories have yet to be told.
ALWAYS ANOTHER COUNTRY
Memoir, 320 pages
Jonathan Ball, October 2017
Msimang writes about her exile childhood in Zambia and Kenya, young adulthood and college years in North America, and return to South Africa in the euphoric 1990s. She reflects candidly on her discontent and disappointment with present-day South Africa but also on her experiences of family, romance, and motherhood, with the novelist’s talent for character and pathos. Her bitter-sweet memoir is at heart a chronicle of a coming-of-age