Gillian Slovo - BiographyGillian Slovo was born in South Africa in 1952. In 1964 she came to England where she still lives. She is the author of the family saga, Ties of Blood, a political thriller, The Betrayal, and a novel, Facade. She has also written a series of thrillers featuring the detective Kate Baeier: Morbid Symptons, Death by Analysis, Death Comes Staccato, Catnap and Close Call. Her memoir, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (available in Abacus paperback), was an international besteller and her last book, Red Dust was a prize winner in France and is currently in production with BBC Films in South Africa starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. She has recently been commissioned by the Tricycle to write a play about asylum seekers, which she is currently researching.The daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa’s pioneering anti-apartheid white activists, Gillian Slovo has always been drawn to writing about the huge sweep of politics. In Every Secret Thing she recalls the extraordinary events which surrounded her family’s persecution and exile, and reconstructs the truth of her parents’ relationship and her own turbulent childhood; in Red Dust she examines the ramifications of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission through the eyes of the fictitious small town of Smitsrivier. Now, in Ice Road, she turns her attention to that most turbulent of countries, Soviet Russia which, as she says: “is a country where those issues of idealism, compromise and survival, not just political but actual bodily survival, were in the forefront of everyday life.” Gillian Slovo lives in North West London with her partner and daughter. < Back |
