Mark Gevisser is a renowned author and journalist from South Africa, born in Johannesburg in 1964. He received his education at King David and Redhill Schools before attending Yale University in the United States, where he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature in 1987. After his graduation, Gevisser worked as a high school teacher and wrote for various publications including The Nation and Village Voice. He returned to South Africa in 1990 and began his journalism career, contributing to several local and international publications such as the New York Times, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Public Culture, and Art in America.
Gevisser has published several books, including "Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa," which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron. He also authored "Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa," a collection of his political profiles from the Mail & Guardian. His book "A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream" was published by Palgrave Macmillan in the UK and Jonathan Ball in South Africa under the title "Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred." The book won the Sunday Times 2008 Alan Paton Prize. Gevisser's work also includes a feature-length documentary, "The Man Who Drove With Mandela," which he co-produced with Greta Schiller. The film won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999.
In addition to his work as an author and journalist, Gevisser is involved in heritage development. He co-led the team that developed the heritage, education, and tourism components of Constitution Hill and co-curated the Hill’s permanent exhibitions. He is also a founder and associate of Trace, a heritage research and design company. Gevisser has also worked as a political analyst and public speaker, with clients including several South African and multinational organizations and corporations. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Writing Fellow in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Pretoria, where he taught in the journalism program and ran a program on public intellectual activity. He is an experienced writing teacher and has conducted narrative non-fiction workshops in South Africa and Kenya. In 2011, he was a Carnegie Equity Fellow at Wits University, where he convened a major event at the university on creativity and memory. Gevisser's forthcoming book, "Dispatcher," is about his personal relationship with his hometown Johannesburg and will be published by Farrar Straus Giroux and Atlantic Press in 2013. Gevisser has also been awarded an Open Society Fellowship for 2012/13, during which he will be looking at the ways ideas about sexuality and gender identity are changing globally and how this is changing the way people think about themselves and their worlds. He will travel to several countries, including the United States, India, Nepal, Russia, Hungary, Poland, China, Turkey, Lebanon, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Brazil, Argentina, and Western Europe.