Episode 3: Mark Gevisser

Mark Gevisser is a Johannesburg-born author and journalist who has written a series of outstanding, prize-winning non-fiction books. After a groundbreaking insight into homosexuality in South Africa, Defiant Desire (1996), he made waves with his comprehensive biography of former president Thabo Mbeki, called Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, which won the Alan Paton Prize in 2008. Equally well received was Lost and Found in Johannesburg, a memoir of place and sexuality, home and identity, which came out in 2012. His latest work, published last year, is The Pink Line, Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers. Time magazine put it in its top 100 must-reads of 2020, while Irish novelist Colm Tóibín called it ‘astute and nuanced’ and ‘engrossing’ in his review for The Guardian. For his research, Mark traveled far and wide to explore how the conversation around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Mark lives in Cape Town with his husband and dog.