Jonathan Ball Jonathan Ball i(A141913 works by) (Organisation) assertion (a.k.a. Jonathan Ball Publishers)
Born: Established: Johannesburg,
c
South Africa,
c
Southern Africa, Africa, ;
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 5 y separately published work icon Always Another Country : A Memoir of Exile and Home Sisonke Msimang , Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball , 2018 13939096 2018 single work autobiography

'SISONKE Msimang was born in exile to South African parents—a freedom fighter and an accountant— and raised in Zambia, Kenya and Canada before studying in the US as an undergraduate. Her family returned to South Africa after apartheid was abolished in the early 1990s.

'Always Another Country is the story of a young girl’s path to womanhood—a journey that took her from Africa to America and back again, then on to a new home in Australia.

'Frank, fierce and insightful, Sisonke reflects candidly on growing up stateless, the naive, heady euphoria of returning at last to her parents’ homeland, and her disillusionment with present-day South Africa and its new elites. Hers is a bold new voice on feminism, race and politics: in her beloved South Africa, in Australia, and around the world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
2 8 y separately published work icon J. M. Coetzee : A Life in Writing J. C. Kannemeyer , ( trans. Michiel Heyns )expression South Africa : Jonathan Ball , 2012 Z1894918 2012 single work biography

J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing is the first biography of Nobel prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee. A global publishing event of the rarest kind, the book has been written with the full co-operation of Coetzee, who granted the author interviews, and put him in touch with family, friends, and colleagues who could talk about events in Coetzee's life.

For the first time, Coetzee allowed complete access to his private papers and documents, including the manuscripts of his sixteen novels. J. C. Kannemeyer has also made a study of the enormous body of literature on Coetzee, and through archival research has unearthed further information not previously available.

The book deals in depth with Coetzee's origins, early years, and first writings; his British interlude from 1962-65; his time in America from 1965-71; his 30 years back in South Africa, when he achieved international recognition and won the Booker prize; and his Australian years since 2002, during which time he won the Nobel Prize.

J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing is a major work that corrects many of the misconceptions about Coetzee, and that illuminates the genesis and implications of his novels. This magisterial biography will be an indispensable source for everybody concerned with Coetzee's life and work. (From Scribe website.)
1 y separately published work icon Place of Birth : A Novel Graham Lang , Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball , 2006 Z1804010 2006 single work novel 'When Vaughn Bourke returns home after twenty-six years it is to exhume the graves of his family from their farm, Hopelands, and to relocate them to a churchyard in Shangani where they'll be safe. He leaves behind him a failed life in Australia - his marriage and professional life in tatters. While he knows the farm is under threat of seizure he has no idea of the nightmare that awaits him in a country where violence and anarchy have replaced the idyll he remembers from his childhood.

'Together with his siblings, Gus and Angela, he begins the arduous task of removing the remains of his forebears from their family soil. But the exhumations soon uncover a terrible event of the past that becomes a prelude to an even greater tragedy in which loss of life and land is the only outcome.' (Trove)
1 y separately published work icon Clouds Like Black Dogs Graham Lang , Johannesburg : Jonathan Ball , 2003 Z1804000 2003 single work novel 'Set in South Africa's turbulent 1980s and concluding in the post-apartheid 1990s, Clouds Like Black Dogs is a vivid and often violent story of loss and redemption. After a troubled upbringing on a West Coast farm, Manas Smith, a young coloured artist, is given assistance by a white benefactor to study art at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. There Manas encounters a spiralling world of political conflict. The repercussions of his naïve friendship with an activist poet, David Harris, are both unpredictable and terrifying. Similarly, his love affair with Zelda Sutton, a fellow art student and descendent of an old and respected Eastern Cape farming family, at a time in South Africa's history when love across the colour bar was not yet condoned, present's unimaginable dangers and consequences.

'Graham Lang strongly evokes the sinister atmosphere of brutality and treachery that pervaded South Africa's political climate during the decade prior to the first democratic election in 1994. It is against this menacing background, and with great difficulty, that Manas finally learns that redemption comes at the cost of exoneration and accountability.' (Trove)
X