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About Gabeba Baderoon Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet. She is the author of three collections of poetry - The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (DaimlerChrysler, 2005) and A hundred silences (Kwela/Snailpress, 2006). Her poetry is included in the anthologies Worldscapes, Ten Hallam Poets, Voices from All Over and Birds in Words, and in journals in South Africa, the United States and Europe, including World Literature Today, St Petersburg Review, Fidelities, New Contrast, Carapace, Chimurenga, New Coin, Karavan, Matter, Illuminations, Sable, Sentinel, Post Scriptum and Meridians. Gabeba is the recipient of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry 2005 and held the Guest Writer Fellowship at the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden in 2005. For 2008, she is the recipient of a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Italy and a Writers Residency at the University of the Witwatersrand, funded by Trust Africa. Her debut collection, The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005), was named a Notable Book of 2005 by the Sunday Independent. A hundred silences was selected for Homebru 2006 by Exclusive Books in South Africa and was short-listed for the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize and the 2007 Olive Schreiner Prize. Both The Dream in the Next Body and A hundred silences were Sunday Times Recommended Books. The story 'High Traffic', from her collection The Museum of Ordinary Life, appears in Cape Town Calling, an anthology of travel writing edited by Justin Fox (Tafelberg, 2007), and "The History of Intimacy" appears in Art South Africa (6.2, Dec. 2007).  Photo: Christine Fourie Since 2005, Gabeba has been a featured poet in several international festivals, including Poetry on the Road in Bremen, Weltklang in Berlin, Poetry Africa in Durban and the Stockholm Poetry Festival. In 2006, she read at Poetry International in Rotterdam, the Bristol Poetry Festival and Poetry International on the South Bank in London and, in 2007, at the Spier Poetry Festival in Cape Town, Winternachten in the Netherlands Antilles, and the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica. She has also read in prestigious literary series such as the Achebe Fellowship Series at Bard College, the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series at the University of Pittsburgh, and with Cecil Giscombe in the Allegheny Mountain Series at Pennsylvania State University. She appeared with Malika Ndlovu, Diana Ferrus, Sandile Dikeni and Antjie Krog in the 16 Days of Activism readings in South Africa, and in 2007 read with Galway Kinnell in the Off the Shelf festival in the UK. In 2008 she has been invited to read in the Winternachten Literary Festival in the Hague in January, the Franschhoek Literary Festival in May and the Bristol Poetry Festival in September. Gabeba's poem 'War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love' accompanied by artwork by Berni Searle, appears in the portfolio "Women for Children's Rights" produced by Art for Humanity. A new series of Gabeba's poems forms part of the E-Pos II art and poetry project, featuring South African and Belgian poets and visual artists. Along with fellow writers Lebo Mashile, Antjie Krog, Gcina Mhlope and Nadine Gordimer, Gabeba was included in The Book of South African Women in 2006, and appeared in 100 Young South Africans in 2007. Gabeba is also a literature and media scholar and holds a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town. Gabeba's poem 'War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love' accompanied by artwork by Berni Searle, appears in the portfolio "Women for Children's Rights" by Art for Humanity, and a new series of Gabeba's poems forms part of the E-Pos II art and poetry project, featuring South African and Belgian poets and visual artists. Along with fellow writers Lebo Mashile, Antjie Krog, Gcina Mhlope and Nadine Gordimer, Gabeba is listed in The Book of South African Women, the Who's Who of South African women published by the Mail & Guardian. Gabeba is also a literature and media scholar and holds a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town. A hundred silences, her third collection of poetry, explores the intimate geographies of love and loss, of leaving and remembering places. In the poems we hear the 'soft, private laugh' of lovers. Old photographs, their 'scalloped edges bent then straightened', show how the past shapes us. Music and silence thread through the collection, from the love songs of Astrud Gilberto to the 'long silence at the start' of a jazz song. A speaker contemplates the house her grandfather built and finds 'the landscape is passing into language'. A hundred silences was published by Kwela/Snailpress in April 2006. |
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Academic biography Gabeba Baderoon received a doctorate in English from the University of Cape Town, with a thesis on images of Islam in South African media, literature and art. She has published widely on the topic of representations of Islam, and has lectured in universities in South Africa, Europe and the US. With Louise Green, she is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on citizenship, religion and identity that considers the experience of Islam in South Africa. |
 Photo: John Thomas Kinyagu |