Mark Gevisser Books in Order

Mark Gevisser was born in Johannesburg in 1964, growing up in a city shaped by apartheid's hard borders. His Jewish family history, the city's maps, and questions of belonging would later run through much of his work.

He left South Africa to study comparative literature at Yale, graduating in 1987. In New York, he taught high school and began writing for publications including The Nation and the Village Voice, learning the practical rhythm of reporting before returning to South Africa in 1990.

The country was entering a different, uncertain chapter.

At the Mail & Guardian, Gevisser built a reputation for close profiles of public figures. Portraits of Power collects forty of those pieces, looking at ministers, premiers, chiefs, generals, and other people navigating the early years of South African democracy. The book is interested in the gap between a public role and the person trying to hold it.

That attention to politics and personality shaped his long study of Thabo Mbeki. Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred follows Mbeki through exile, the anti-apartheid struggle, and the presidency, while also tracing the pressures facing South Africa after 1994. A shorter version, A Legacy of Liberation, brings that story to an international readership and considers what Mbeki's rise and fall meant for the country's democratic hopes. The Mbeki biography won the Alan Paton Prize in 2008.

Gevisser has also spent decades writing about queer life and sexual politics. In 1996, he co-edited Defiant Desire with Edwin Cameron, bringing together essays by gay and lesbian South Africans from different racial, class, and regional backgrounds. It connected personal testimony to the wider struggle against apartheid and to the making of a new constitutional democracy.

People, places, and systems are rarely separate in his books.

In Lost and Found in Johannesburg, Gevisser turns the reporting lens toward his own life. Maps, photographs, family records, and memories guide a memoir about growing up gay and Jewish in Johannesburg, as well as the city’s racial geography and the aftermath of a violent home invasion. It is both a family story and an attempt to understand how a city can shape someone’s sense of self.

His interest in public memory has also reached beyond the page. He helped develop heritage, tourism, and education components at Constitution Hill and co-curated its permanent exhibitions. He also wrote the documentary The Man Who Drove with Mandela, which received the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

For The Pink Line, Gevisser traveled across nine countries to follow people living amid fast-changing debates over sexuality and gender identity. The book moves between intimate lives and larger arguments about law, family, religion, migration, and online culture. It will appeal to readers who want global reporting anchored in individual stories rather than an abstract survey.

Alongside his books, Gevisser has worked as a journalist, exhibition curator, nonfiction teacher, documentary filmmaker, and strategic communications consultant. He has lived in the United States and France, and now lives outside Cape Town. His work keeps returning to the same big question: how do public change and private life meet?