Country Of My Skull

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Krog, Antjie

ISBN

9781770220744

Format

Trade Paperback

Recommended Price

R350.00

Published

November 2009

About the book:

‘This is Antjie Samuel reporting from Ladybrand …’

For more than two years, Antjie Krog worked in acute engagement with the many voices that arose in and around South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From the legislative genesis of the Commission, through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, the revelations from apartheid’s operatives, the appearance of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and former president PW Botha’s courthouse press conference, to the Commission’s meeting with the media on Robben Island early in 1998 – this award-winning poet leads us on an extraordinary odyssey.

Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth Commission’s work in a uniquely personal narrative which is harrowing, illuminating and provocative.

Krog’s powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions and secret themes, taking us beneath the big movements of the Truth Commission – and beyond … into the very heart of what it means to be a South African today.

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About the Author

Antjie Krog was born and grew up in the Free State. She became editor of the Afrikaans current-affairs magazine Die Suid-Afrikaan and later worked as a radio jounalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, all the while writing extensively for newspapers and journals. She and her radio colleagues

received the Pringle Award for excellence in journalism for their coverage of the Commission hearings, from which came the best known of her three non-fiction books, Country of My Skull.

She has won major awards in almost all the genres and media in which she has worked: poetry, non-fiction and translation. But, mainly, she has lived as a poet. Krog’s first volume of poetry was published when she was seventeen years old and she has since released thirteen volumes of poetry and received among others the Eugène Marais Prize, the Hertzog Prize, the FNB Prize, the Protea Prize, and, for non-fiction, the Alan Paton Prize and the Olive Schreiner Award. She has also been a recipient of the Stockholm Award from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture and the Open Society Prize. She is married to architect John Samuel.