Books
Show Me the Place: Essays (Jonathan Ball, 2024).
Experiments with Truth. Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa (African Articulations, James Currey / Boydell and Brewer, 2019).
Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World (Kwela Books, 2017).
A collection of essays and creative non-fiction.
Essays, stories, journalism, reviews
The Best a Man Can Get. New Contrast 205. May 2024.
Show Me the Place (excerpt). Sunday Times, 30 April 2024.
Firepool (excerpt). Conjunctions 80: Ways of Water. Bard College, Spring 2023.
To Spite His Face. What happened to Cecil Rhodes’s nose? Letter from Cape Town, Harper’s, December 2021 (& Harper’s podcast).
‘As Others Feel Pain in Their Lungs’: Albert Camus’s The Plague. English Studies in Africa, 64:1-2 (2021).
Matching Shadows. Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit. Business Day, 14 September 2021.
The Great Dying. In Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying, edited by Bongani Kona. Jonathan Ball, 2021.
Dirty Butter. Artificial Selection by Elize Vossgätter. Catalogue essay, Everard Read gallery, Cape Town. August 2021.
Reading the Plague. Podcast for SA PEN’s ‘The Empty Chair’. 27 May 2021. Spotify.
Barbarian Phase. Wasafiri, June 2021.
Nineteen Eighty-Six. Review of William Dicey, 1986. Business Day, 4 May 2021.
Train on a Bridge. Visiting the Kruger National Park. Financial Times, 21 April 2021.
Testimony. Profile of artist Sue Williamson. Financial Times, 20 February, 2021.
A Strange Luminescence. Catalogue essay, Risk in Writing, A4 Arts Foundation. 1 July 2020.
A Cold Country Where the Sun Shines. Minor Literatures, 28 January 2020.
Picturing the Universe. Radio astronomy and the Square Kilometre Array. Business Day, 14 January 2020.
A Surfing Half-Life. Business Day, 27 August 2019. Locals only version on Wavescape.
Monsoon Raag. Prufrock, final edition, May 2019.
A Literary Con. Rereading Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost. Johannesburg Review of Books, 1 April 2019.
Shadow of a Drought. Cape Town's water crisis and its aftermath. Financial Times, 27 July 2018. With photographs by Kent Andreasen.
The Firepool: On scandal, Jacob Zuma and swimming in South Africa. Financial Times, 18 August 2017. Water: A Summer Special.
‘Three great hopes for a post-apartheid culture, gone too soon’ – On Phaswane Mpe, Moses Taiwa Molelekwa and K Sello Duiker (excerpt from Firepool). Johannesburg Review of Books, 3 July 2017.
Journey's End. Review of Mohsin Hamid, Exit West. Financial Times, 25 February 2017.
The Sound of Islay. Introducing the FT / Bodley Head essay competition. Financial Times, 11 November 2016.
The Institute for the Less Good Idea. Profile of William Kentridge for Financial Times magazine, 2 September 2016.
Half-lives, Half Truths. Svetlana Alexievich and the nuclear imagination. South Africa PEN essay series, 18 August 2016.
A Visit to a Deconstruction Site. Diary, Financial Times, 15 April 2016.
An Interview with Rustum Kozain. Wasafiri, 31:2 (2016).
Nuclear Summer. A walk through South Africa's nuclear pasts and futures. Sunday Times, 7 February 2016.
The Art of Fear. Review of Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time. Financial Times, 15 January 2016.
The Swimmer's Progress. Openings column. Financial Times, 8 January 2016.
27 Years. Listening to Moses Taiwa Molelekwa. Prufrock magazine, September 2015.
A Mighty Fry Up. Review of Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen. New Statesman, 15 September 2015.
I’m Generalizing, But… Openings Column. Financial Times, 14 August 2015.
Confession of the Lioness. By Mia Couto, translated by David Brookshaw. Review, 31 July 2015, Financial Times.
That Middling Line. Review of Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing: E.M. Forster's Legacy. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2015.
The Marvellous Real. Review of E. C. Osondu, This House is Not for Sale. Financial Times, 5 June 2015.
An Unnatural History. Review of Henrietta Rose-Innes, Green Lion. Sunday Times. 9 May 2015.
Distant Horizons. MAN Booker International Prize Finalists and Rhodes Must Fall at the University of Cape Town. Financial Times, 3 April 2015.
Lapsed South Africans. Review of Eben Venter, Wolf, Wolf, translated by Michiel Heyns. Financial Times, 13 March, 2015.
Parliament of Fouls. Unparliamentary Language, Tsafendas and Penny Siopis's 'Obscure White Messenger'. Sunday Times, 18 January 2015.
Lost in Joburg. Reissue of Ivan Vladislavic, The Restless Supermarket. New Statesman, 9-15 January, 2015.
The ‘I’ in Writer. Meeting Geoff Dyer. Mail&Guardian, 23 December 2014.
Prince Pro. In Object Relations: Essays and Images, edited and photographed by Stephen Inggs. Reprinted in Monday Monthly, 1 December 2014.
The Life of the Mine. Remembering Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014). Business Day, 22 July 2014.
N2: A Literature Review. Narratives of the Road in South Africa. Cityscapes. Issue 05, April 2014.
New Maps of Africa. Review of Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief and Mark Gevisser, Dispatcher: Lost and Found in Johannesburg. New Statesman, 13-19 June, 2014.
Closed City. Walking through Cape Town with Teju Cole. Financial Times, 24 January 2014.
Indefinite Delay. The Last Days of Nelson Mandela. New Statesman, 10 October 2013. Cover story.
Highway N2 Revisited. Financial Times, 20 September 2013.
Night Rider. Review of Rawi Hage, Carnival. Financial Times, 6 September 2013.
Alchemists of the Ordinary. Review of Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading and Archie Dick, The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures. Mail & Guardian, 23 August 2013.
The Enlightenment, the colonial Cape and post-apartheid discourse. Review of David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation. Historia, 58:1, May 2013.
Train Wreck. Review of Paul Theroux, Last Train to Zona Verde: Overland from Cape Town to Angola. New Statesman, 23 May 2013.
Modern Mystery Play. Review of J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus. Financial Times, 8 March 2013.
The Oscar Pistorius Case: History Written on a Woman’s Body. New Statesman, Cover Story, 7 March 2013.
Don’t Say Etc: Lost and Found in the Work of Ivan Vladislavic. Public Books, 6 March 2013.
Getting Past Coetzee. Winner of the inaugural Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Competition, 2012. Also published as digital e-short by Bodley Head. First appeared in Norwegian as å Komme forbi Coetzee. Bokvennen litterært magasin | Oslo | nr. 3.12.
For real? Arguing with David Shields. Reading Reality Hunger from Africa South. Rhodes Journalism Review, no. 32 (2012).
How the right-wing co-opts the lexicon of social justice. Review of Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor for SLiPnet (Stellenbosch Literary Project). The Future Eaters. Streamlined version at The Daily Maverick.
Elegy on trial: Writing the African Resistance Movement. Review of Hugh Lewin, Stones Against the Mirror: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle for SLiPnet (Stellenbosch Literary Project).
Between a Howl and a Whine. Review of Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011) for SLiPnet (Stellenbosch Literary Project).
What the Butler Didn’t See. Review of Chris Thurman, Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life, in South African Journal of Science, (2011).
Marabi Nights, Merry Blackbirds, Epistles and Exiles: Jazz in South African Literature 1950-1970. Review surveying works by Gwen Ansell, David Coplan, Michael Titlestad and others. English in Africa (October 2010).
Review of Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language, by Shane Moran. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (Winter 2010).
Mixed Metaphors: Review of Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred in Journal of Southern African Studies 34:4 (2008).
Guilty Pleasures: Review of Michael Chapman, Omnibus of a Century of South African Short Stories. LitNet website.
Isigingc’ asakh’ umuzi – (A guitar does not build a homestead): Review of David Coplan, In Township Tonight! Three Centuries of South African Black City Music and Theatre. LitNet website.
Love in the Archive: Review of Pippa Skotnes, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. LitNet website.
A Doggy Dog World: Review of Jonny Steinberg, Notes from a Fractured Country: Selected Journalism. LitNet website.
‘Main Road, Kapstadt’ Neue Rundschau 120:2 (2009) Special issue on Africa. A translated version of the piece in A City Imagined (see below), placed alongside contributions by Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Taxi on Main. A City Imagined: Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place, ed. Stephen Watson.
Research articles and book chapters
Memoir, Utopia, and Belonging in the Postcolony: Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone. Biography, 46:3, (2024).
Anybody Can. Your History With Me: The Films of Penny Siopis. Ed. Sarah Nuttall. Duke University Press, 2024.
Sounding Environments (with Aragorn Eloff). The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Ed. Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart. December 2023. Outtakes.
Matching Shadows: Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit. Roundtable on University of Cape Town fire of April 2021. Safundi 22 (2022).
Shadow of a Drought: Notes from Cape Town’s water crisis. Interventions special issue: Reading for Water, ed. Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, and Sarah Nuttall, 24:3 (2022).
‘As Others Feel Pain in Their Lungs’: Albert Camus’s The Plague. English Studies in Africa, 64:1-2 (2021). Book publication: The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics ed. Michael Titlestad, Karl van Wyk and Grace A. Musila. Routledge: 2022.
Teaching the Environmental Humanities: International Perspectives and Practices. Environmental Humanities 11:2 (2019). Contributing author.
Experiments with Truth: Narrative Nonfiction in South Africa. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 31:2 (2019).
Impossible Images: Radio Astronomy, the SKA and the Limits of Representation. Journal of Southern African Studies 45:2 (2019).
‘A Very Strange Relationship’: Life Writing, Overwriting and the Scandal of Biography in the Gordimer-Roberts Affair. Biography, 41:1 (2018).
Thirteen Ways: Teaching writing, creative and otherwise. At the Foot of the Volcano: Reflections on Teaching at a South African University. Ed. Susan Levine. HSRC Press, 2018.
N2: Reading and Writing the South African Highway. Social Dynamics, 43:1 (2017).
An Interview with Rustum Kozain. Wasafiri, 31:2 (2016).
Nothing Extraordinary: E.M. Forster and the English limit, in Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (University of Cape Town Press, 2015).
Unusable Pasts: Life-writing, Literary Non-fiction and the Case of Demetrios Tsafendas. Research in African Literatures, 46:3 (2015).
Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society. Environmental Humanities, vol. 7 (2015). Co-authored with Susanna Lidström, Simon West, Tania Katzschner and M. Isabel Pérez-Ramos (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden).
Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of ‘Research’. Safundi, 16:4 (2015).
Sea Point Contact: Preface to a Literary History of Cape Town (Never Written). Weeds and Viruses: Ecopolitics and the Demands of Theory. Editors: Cordula Lemke and Jennifer Wawrzinek (2015). Foreword by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Rachel Carson and the Perils of Simplicity: Reading Silent Spring from the global South. Ariel. Special Issue on Postcolonial Ecologies, 44:4 (2014).
Nothing Extraordinary: E. M. Forster and the English Limit. English in Africa, 40:2 (2013).
The Sea Close By: The Coastal Diaries of Albert Camus, Athol Fugard and Stephen Watson. Alternation, Special Issue: Coastlines and Littoral Zones, (2013).
Writing the Company: From VOC Daghregister to Sleigh’s Eilande. South African Historical Journal, 65:1 (2013).
‘A Country Where You Couldn’t Make this Shit Up? Literary Non-fiction in South Africa’, with responses by Stephen Clingman, Rob Nixon and others. Safundi, Special Issue: Beyond Rivalry: Fact | Fiction, Literature | History (2012).
‘The Bushmen’s Letters’: |Xam Narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection and their Afterlives. Chapter One, The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012), ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge.
From the Origin of Language to a Language of Origin: a Prologue to the Grey Collection. Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa, ed. Andrew van der Vlies, (Johannesburg: Wits Press, 2012).
First Lives, First Words: Camões, Magical Realism and the Limits of Invention. Scrutiny2, 17:1 (2012).
All Like and yet Unlike the Old Country: Kipling in Cape Town 1891-1908: A Reappraisal.’ English in Africa, 39:2 (2012)