Ronald Suresh Roberts

Ronald Suresh Roberts, also known as RSR, is a Trinidadian biographer and columnist. He currently lives in South Africa.

Early life

Roberts was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. He received a national scholarship to study at Bailliol College, Oxford in the United Kingdom, then received his LLM degree from Harvard Law School.

Biographies

Roberts has written books on the lives of South African President Thabo Mbeki, Nobel Prize in literature winner Nadine Gordimer, and American jurist Clarence Thomas. He writes columns for Empire magazine and the website thoughtleader.co.za, and is a regular letter writer and guest columnist for several South African newspapers.

Controversy

Roberts first approached Nadine Gordimer regarding a biography in 1996. Gordimer initially agreed, with the condition that she would have oversight of the resulting manuscript. After several years of interviews and research, Roberts provided Gordimer with a draft; Gordimer objected to multiple points of the manuscript. When Roberts refused to make changes, Gordimer refused to authorize the biography. Publishers Bloomsbury Publishing in London and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York subsequently withdrew from the project. Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, stated that the decision to decline the manuscript was not due solely to Gordimer's objections to the content but also to the quality of the writing. A publisher at Bloomsbury spoke positively about the manuscript, but cited Gordimer's refusal to authorize the biography as their reason not to publish it. Roberts characterized Gordimer's attempts to prevent publication of the biography as censorship and subsequently self-published the manuscript.

Roberts' work on Thabo Mbeki was heavily criticized as a hagiography. Major banking group Absa sponsored the book, contributing R1.43 million towards it. The Democratic Alliance political party accused Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad of arranging for the sponsorship as an official act of the government, rather than as a private citizen, despite Pahad's reporting directly to Mbeki.

In 2007 author Anthony Brink accused Roberts of plagiarizing sections of the biography and launched a campaign to publicize the claim by way of an e-book titled Lying and thieving: The fraudulent scholarship of Ronald Suresh Roberts in 'Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki' .

Roberts has accused the South African media of censorship several times, demanding apologies from various newspapers including The Sunday Times, and has been granted at least one retraction. Roberts has also accused Business Day editor Peter Bruce of censoring his opinions; in a 2007 column Mail & Guardian editor Ferial Haffajee said Roberts "tests my commitment to freedom of expression".