Pan Macmillan

White Lion, the film based on the remarkable life of Kevin Richardson, South Africa’s own “lion whisperer” opens in theaters on Friday 19th February. Richardson, together with Tony Parks, chronicled his incredible experiences with lions in Part of the Pride.

What started out as a dream has grown into an awe-inspiring new film by Rodney and Ilana Fuhr, the husband and wife team who are also the owners of the Johannesburg Lion Park.

White Lion, released in South Africa on 19 February, is a family adventure that follows the life of a white lion, Letsatsi, who is born into a tawny pride in the wilds of Africa. His colour difference makes life very difficult for him, forcing him to find his own way in the world, amidst numerous obstacles. Cast off by his pride as a young cub because of his curious complexion, Letsatsi is forced to make his way on his own in the wild, learning how to survive the threat of competitors for food, predatory crocodiles, and the growing threat of hunters who are willing to pay anything for the chance to track and kill this rare creature.

• Read the complete article

• White Lion the Movie homepage

Watch the trailer:

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Book details

• Part of the Pride by Kevin Richardson and Tony Parks
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  EAN: 9780312556747
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In a preview article for a book that’s coming out from Pan Macmillan later this year, the Sunday Independent’s Maureen Isaacson asks, Who is the real Mandela – the person who lives practically in his own media-and-Hollywood generated shadow? Vernon Harris of the Nelson Mandela Foundation is in charge of directing the “memory archive” of Madiba’s papers. Isaacson speaks to him about the task of curating the legacy of a legend:

Nelson Mandela is in danger of being swallowed by Morgan Freeman and Hollywood.

Even as celebrations for the 20th anniversary of Mandela’s release from prison conjure memories of the stoical “prisoner in the garden”, the face of liberation, the Gandhian reconciler, there is an attempt to rescue him from the jaws of his admirers.

Among those looking for the nuances once associated with Mandela, man of many faces, is the memory team at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in Houghton. It is hard at work, retrieving the light and shade that fashioned Mandela the dancer, boxer, lover, husband, lawyer, comrade, revolutionary, guerrilla leader and statesman. We are familiar with some of these.

But what was really happening in the heart of the man who at 75 went to the hustings, leading the ANC’s election campaign as he faced down the possibility of a rampant right wing onslaught?

Did anyone ever know?

• Read the complete article

Photo courtesy Daymix

Eric Miyeni will be launching his latest oeuvre, A Letter from Paris in Parkhurst, Johannesburg this evening. Ahead of the event, the Sowetan published this profile of the author and photographer:

ERIC Miyeni, the actor, radio personality and author, has come up with a journal of essays and photographs depicting French society. The journal will be launched today in Parkhurst, northern Johannesburg.

Called A Letter from Paris, the publication is poised to cause some interest in Johannesburg’s intellectual circles given the author’s background as a polemicist.

This journal follows Miyeni’s visit to Paris in 2007, accompanied by his trusty pen and camera, where he spent two weeks keenly observing the city’s architecture, its history, its people and culture.

• Read the complete article

• Click here for book launch details

Book details

• O’Mandingo!: The Only Black at a Dinner Party by Eric Miyeni
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  EAN: 9781770091870
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• A Letter from Paris: Essays and Photographs by Eric Miyeni
  EAN: 9781770101722
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Coming out at the tail end of this summer!

“In Last Summer the elegies of love are sung in measured and ironic tones. Higginson’s narrative poise, his understated and restrained emotional charge, are like cool air in our hot literary landscape.”
– Leon de Kock

It is summer in Stratford-upon-Avon. Thomas is a young theatre director at the Royal Shakespeare Company who is desperately in love with Lucy, the leading actress in a production of The Tempest. Their experiences are woven into the life of a theatre presided over by Harry, an ageing South African exile who becomes caught up in a history he sought to escape.

Hilarious and deeply affecting by turn, Thomas’s account is compelling in its lyricism, eccentricity and energetic attachment to life. Through him, we get to meet a colourful cast of characters and live through the gripping events of an ill-fated summer in Stratford.

“Writing believably about theatre folk is hard to pull off, given the slippery slope of their own fictional allegiances, but in Last Summer Craig Higginson manages with some panache a multi-layered love story filled with warmth and lyricism. I was captivated.”
– Janet Suzman, Actress

About the author

Craig Higginson is a novelist, playwright and theatre director. Currently he is the Literary Manager of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and teaches writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. In the course of ten years spent in England, he worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Last Summer is his third novel.

Book details

• Last Summer by Craig Higginson
  EAN: 9781770101814
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SA’s own Lion Whisperer, Kevin Richardson, and his lions have been involved in the production of the film White Lion – Home… is a Journey, due for release this February.

The film has been nominated for a string of awards at the SAFTAS (South African Film and Television Awards): Best Cinematography, Best Music Score and Best Sound Design. It looks like it’s going to be well worth seeing. If you’d like to get to know the film’s feline stars so long have a look at Richardson’s book, Part of the Pride, co-authored with Tony Parks.

Here’s more on the film:

“The casting process was a tricky one,” recalled Richardson.

“As the original story was about a tawny lion, I had all my little tawnies, of all age-groups, lined-up, and then we got the call saying, ‘Hang on a moment what would you say if we cast the main hero as a white lion!’ It made sense, but it also made my life a nightmare. We only had a few white lions at the Lion Park, and our main hero white lion, an adult male, is probably the only completely workable one in the country. The two lions that we actually had to source, were the lions needed to portray the teenage period of Letsatsi’s life. The lions we finally used were ‘Bruce’ and ‘Bravo’ who were aged just fourteen-months at the time.” Richardson continued. “The difference between these lions and those in other movies or Hollywood productions, is that ours are not ‘trained’ lions; i.e. lions who can hit their marks: stop there, sit down, lay, stay.”

• Read the complete article at WhiteLiontheMovie.com (click the “Casting” tab)

And here’s the video trailer:

• Not loading? Watch at trailer home

Book details

• Part of the Pride by Kevin Richardson, Tony Parks
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  EAN: 9780312556747
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The popular Mail & Guardian series catches up with the author of Lost Colours of the Chameleon:

Describe yourself in a sentence.
I’m a man who wants to understand all that I should know to sustain me during this lifetime.

Describe your ideal reader.
My ideal reader is someone open to the unexpected.

What are you working on?
I’m writing a detective novel that has its origin in the MK camps in Angola.

• Read the complete article

Book details

• The Lost Colours of the Chameleon by Mandla Langa
  EAN: 9781770100848
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Posed by the Mail & Guardian:

Which book, if any, changed your life?

I hate this question because the instant I’ve finished writing this, I’ll remember countless important books that escape me right now. I’ve always felt perhaps I ought to make up some obscure, deeply intellectual tome to make myself sound clever.

The first book that touched me deeply as a child was a collection of Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories. I wept inconsolably when The Nightingale and the Rose was read to me.

But I do remember being struck by the beauty of the words. I learnt the stories off by heart and pretended to read them to my classmates. I had to fake the reading thing because I was dyslexic. That book saved me an awful lot of teasing and torment.

When I did learn, books became a refuge. My parents had a wonderful store of books and I developed passions — reading my way through their Kiplings, Jane Austen, all my mother’s Georgette Heyers and even an old volume of Balzac. In adolescence it was DH Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald and JD Salinger.

Changed my life? Well, I spent years searching for Joshua Shapiro from Mordechai Richler’s Joshua Then and Now, whom I was convinced would be the great love of my life. Then I thought myself in love with Stingo from Sophie’s Choice.

It’s quite telling that all my literary loves were writers. I think I was somehow searching for the writer in me.

Of course the novel that literally changed my life was my own first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken. Everything changed from the moment it was accepted — if not externally, then certainly within me. I became a writer.

• Complete article in the M&G

Book details

• My Brother’s Book by Jo-Anne Richards
  EAN: 9781770100770
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Describe yourself in a sentence.
I’m a cigar-smoking, hard-thinking, tough-acting, cowardly person who’s occasionally sweet and usually quiet sanguine.

Describe your ideal reader.
Smart, progressive and open-minded.

What are you working on?
I’m working on another crime thriller, the working title of which is: “The Black Widow Spider Society.” As the title suggests, it’s about a bunch of wealthy women who form a society that assists them to dispose of their husbands once the first blush of love subsides and turns into its nastier cousins: infidelity, jealousy or some such malaise.

• Complete article in the Mail & Guardian

Book details

• Red Ink by Angela Makholwa
  EAN: 9781770100688
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For chef Marlene van der Westhuizen, cooking is very much a calling, a labour of love. Her passion for food and entertainment is tangible when paging through her delightful new book, Sumptuous.

You too can become a super chef by learning from the master herself: van der Westhuizen gives private cooking classes. She and her marble slab (which up to fifteen aspiring chefs can crowd around) recently appeared in a Property Magazine feature on South Africa’s top kitchenistas:

Marlene took a long detour through her life to become a chef. ‘I was in Brussels with Deon [her husband]. There was a little chef shop on a tiny little street. It was an amazing place: the deeper you went in, the bigger the pots became. I walked through this shop and I suddenly realised that yes, you are a good cook but you know fuck all. It was bit of a moment. I was 34 years old. I’d wasted fabulous opportunities and now – what was I going to do? I talked to Deon on the plane back and said either I do it now or I shall regret my life forever.

• Read the complete article

Book details

• Sumptuous: Food from the heart of France to the Cape by Marlene van der Westhuizen
  EAN: 9781920075910
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The annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture is given by Africa’s foremost scholars and artists, as well as religious and political leaders.

Each lecture is a resuscitative moment in which the enduring legacy and leadership of Steve Biko are explored in a contemporary context. Issues crucial to Biko, such as the inextricable link between the individual and society, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing many developing nations are examined in order to further define the mandate for the current generation of leaders.

This book is published in commemoration and celebration of the life and legacy of Steve Biko, in the hope that it will contribute to realising the purpose for which he lived and died: restoring people to their true humanity.

Contributors

Njabulo Ndebele
Zakes Mda
Chinua Achebe
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Nelson Mandela
Mamphela Ramphele
Desmond Tutu
Thabo Mbeki
Trevor Manuel

Contents

Introduction, Nkosinathi Biko; 1. Iph’ Indlela? Finding our Way into the Future, Njabulo S Ndebele; 2. Biko’s Children, Zakes Mda; 3. Fighting Apartheid with Words, Chinua Achebe; 4. Recovering our Memory: South Africa in the Black Imagination, Ngugi wa Thiong’o; 5. Ten Years of Democracy: 1994–2004, Nelson Mandela; 6. Citizenship as Stewardship, Mamphela Ramphele; 7. South Africa: A Scintillating Success Waiting to Happen, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu; 8. 30th Commemoration of Steve Biko’s Death, Thabo Mbeki; 9. Energising Democracy: Rights and Responsibilities, Former Minister Trevor Manuel

Book details

• The Steve Biko Memorial Lectures (Various Contributors)
  EAN: 9781770101630
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