Photograph by Fiona McPherson
Mark Gevisser is the award-winning author and editor of several non-fiction books, and has been widely published as a journalist.. His latest books include The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers (2020); the updated edition of the award-winning bestseller Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2022); and The Revolution will not be Litigated (2023), which he co-edited with Katie Redford.
Mark’s journalism and criticism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Granta, and many other publications. He is also the author of Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (2014), and was the co-editor of the groundbreaking Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (1994). His celebrated Mark Gevisser Profiles in the Mail & Guardian were anthologized in Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa (1998) He has published widely, in anthologies, on sexual politics, culture, art, literature and urbanism in South Africa.
Mark was born in Johannesburg and now lives outside Cape Town with his husband. He has also lived in the United States, where he gained a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from Yale, and in France. As well as writing, he works as a strategic communications consultant in the political and non-profit sectors, and has been an exhibition curator, a writing teacher, and a documentary filmmaker.
Mark's feature-length documentary, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, made with Greta Schiller, has been broadcast internationally, and won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999. The film is an excavation of the life of Cecil Williams, the South African gay communist theatre director. Mark has also written scripts for the South African drama series Zero Tolerance; his scripts were short-listed for SAFTA and Emmy awards.
For several years, Mark co-led the team that developed the heritage, education and tourism components of Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, and co-curated the Hill's permanent exhibitions. Other exhibition projects have included Joburg Tracks, an exploration of sexual identity in Johannesburg. As a strategic communications consultant and researcher, his clients have included non-profit foundations in the environmental justice and LGBTQ+ sectors, as well as political parties and politicians.
Mark has a particular interest in working with activists and professionals in social and political movements, to help them find ways of telling their own stories and putting them in the world. Between 2020 and 2023, he worked with twenty-five leading movement lawyers and social justice activists from all over the world in this way. The result is the book, The Revolution will not be Litigated.
He is an experienced writing teacher and coach, and has conducted narrative non-fiction workshops in South African universities and newsrooms, and for Commonwealth Writers and Kwani! in East Africa. Between 2018 and 2022 he was a judge on the Gerald Kraak Award for writing on gender, human rights and sexuality in Africa.
Mark at home in Kalk Bay. Pic: Tommy Trenchard