Confrontation and healing through literature

Confrontation and healing through literature

Venue: Lecture Theatre 3, Kramer Law Building, University of Cape Town

Date: 9 October

Time: 18:00

Fees: R100 Full fee; Staff and students R50; FOSS members R90

Booking is via Webtickets Confrontation and healing through literature (webtickets.co.za)

Join Alistair Mackay for a conversation with award-winning author C.A. Davids as they discuss The Child, the story of a queer couple who move home to Cape Town from New York to adopt a child. As the adoption gets underway and fatherhood looms, the narrator is forced to confront his own long-repressed childhood trauma. He and his marriage begin to unravel. The novel sets the scene for a rich discussion about mental health, queer joy, intergenerational trauma and how we find ways to heal ourselves and each other.

Alistair Mackay is the author of The Child. His debut novel, It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, The Sunday Times Literary Awards, and was chosen by Brittle Paper as a Notable African Book of 2022. His short stories have been published in Commonwealth Writers’ Adda Magazine, Brittle Paper, New Contrast, The Kalahari Review, and in the anthologies Queer Africa: Selected Stories, and Queer Africa II, which was a finalist in the 2017 Lambda Literary Awards. He holds an MA in politics from Edinburgh University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York. He lives in Cape Town.

C.A. Davids works as a writer and as an arts and culture worker. Her second novel, How to be a Revolutionary, was published in 2022 by Verso Books in the USA and the UK, and by Penguin Random House in South Africa. It won the University of Johannesburg’s Literature Main Prize, the Book Lounge’s Book of the Year and The Sunday Times Literary Prize. Her debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in 2013 by Modjaji Books and was shortlisted for local and international literary awards. She has a Master’s degree in creative writing, a degree in economics and a postgraduate diploma in marketing from the University of Cape Town. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the University of Johannesburg. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa, but has also called Shanghai in China, New Jersey in the USA, and Basel in Switzerland home.

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