Dear Friends If you’re visiting Cape Town soon, be sure to see Alexis Preller’s retrospective, Mythical Lexicon at the Norval Foundation. Preller is one of South Africa’s greatest artists, his work an alchemy of the world’s mythologies, a demonstration of sensitivity…
Dear friends Let’s get to it… /strategyI love interviews. The dialogue between a skilled questioner and an intriguing guest is a wonderful format for revealing insight. My favourites are The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction which are often months and multiple conversations…
Hello friends I am back. I’d paused the letter for two weeks to get on top of all I’d read. Although not as productive as I’d hoped, I was partially successful. My research assistants corralled nine recently read books’ highlights into…
Dear friends During the pandemic, I received an email from one of my favourite independent bookstores, Cape Town’s The Book Lounge, with an unusual proposition – ‘send us an email telling us what books you’ve enjoyed, and we’ll make a…
Dear friends Bibliophiles should diarise 4 August and oenophiles 22 August. I first encountered Anna de Koningh, in Phakamisa Ndzamela’s masterfully researched The Native Merchants, which I wrote about here. She started life enslaved and ended it as one of…
Good morning good people This week, I intended to share insights from Shafiq Morton’s A Mercy to All, which tells the story of Gift of the Givers and its founder, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman. And then, on Thursday morning, Ahmed Abbasi, the…
Good morning good people In last week’s letter, we encountered Bulgarian Booker-Prize winner, Georgi Gospodinov’s formulation that “When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing…
Dear Friends Thank you for your messages following the Love + Work and Build Better Teams letters. I appreciated understanding how they were useful for you. If you’d like to comment on last week’s letter, you can do so here. Today’s…
Dear friends This week the 2023 Booker Prize longlist was announced. It is wonderful to see the inclusion of Nigerian author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s A Spell of Good Things. If you missed it, I shared my thoughts about it in this letter (it…
Hello friends I hope that you’re well today. A year ago, we took the decision to sell our house and look for a new place to live. Part one of that was accomplished a few months ago. Then, we found…
Good morning my friends Let’s start with some sweetness… If you have young children, Cape Town freediver Zandi Ndhlovu’s book Zandi’s Song is a gorgeous celebration of the ocean’s beauty. It’s a wonderful way to introduce them to nature and…
Good morning my friends Please forgive me, I have meandered a little today. I will return to our tighter formula next week. Winter has arrived in the Cape. The days are soaked by long steady rains, interrupted only by moments of…