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Beverley Naidoo

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Beverley Naidoo is a popular South African author of children's books. Her award-winning novels mainly feature life in South Africa where she spent her childhood.[1] She has also written a biography of the trade unionist Neil Aggett.<ref.A family’s loss, a country’s painful past, by Sue-Grant Marshall, Business Day, 23 October 2012</ref>

The Other Side of Truth, published by Puffin in 2000, is a story about political corruption and how that affects the lives of the kids of an out spoken writer. For that work she won the annual Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.[2]

Naidoo won the Josette Frank Award twice – in 1986 for Journey to Jo'burg and in 1997 for No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa.

Biography

Beverley Naidoo was born in South Africa on 21 May, 1943 and grew up under apartheid. As a student, she began to question the apartheid regime and was later arrested for her actions as part of the resistance movement in South Africa.[3] In 1965, she came to England and married another South African exile; they have two children. She graduated from the University of York with a BA in Education in 1968.[4]

Books

Journey to Jo'burg, Chain of Fire and Out of Bounds are set in South Africa under apartheid, while No Turning Back concerns the experiences of a boy trying to survive on the streets of Johannesburg in the immediate post-apartheid years. The Other Side of Truth and its sequel, Web of Lies, deal with the experiences of Nigerian political asylum seekers in England. Her 2007 novel Burn My Heart has an imagined point of reference in the boyhood in Kenya of a second cousin, Neil Aggett, being set in the 1950s during the Mau Mau uprising.[5]

Beverley Naidoo has also written several picture books, featuring children from Botswana and England. In 2004, she wrote the picture book Baba's Gift, set in contemporary South Africa, with her daughter, Maya Naidoo.[6] In The Great Tug of War and Other Stories she retells African folktales, the precursors of the Brer Rabbit tales. "I really believe that everyone should have rights, including the poor and unfortunate."

Works

  • Journey to Jo'burg (1985)
  • Chain of Fire (1989) ISBN 0-397-32427-8
  • Through whose Eye? Exploring Racism (1992)
  • No Turning Back (1995)
  • The Other Side of Truth (2000)
  • The Great Tug of War and Other Stories (2001)
  • Out of Bounds: Seven Stories of Conflict and Hope (2003)
  • Web of Lies (2004)
  • Making It Home: Real-life Stories from Children Forced to Flee (with Kate Holt)
  • Burn My Heart (2007)
  • Call of the Deep (2008)
  • Death of an Idealist (2012)

Picture books

  • Letang and Julie Save the Day (1994)
  • Letang's New Friend (1994)
  • Trouble for Letang and Julie (1994)
  • Where Is Zami? (1998)
  • King Lion in Love (2004)
  • Baba's Gift (2004) (with Maya Naidoo)

See also

References

  1. ^ The novels.
  2. ^ (Carnegie Winner 2000). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 2012-08-17.
  3. ^ Channel 4 Bookbox: Beverley Naidoo
  4. ^ "Award-winning South African Writer". Grapevine (Spring/SUmmer 2002). Alumni Office, University of York: 3.
  5. ^ Burn My Heart
  6. ^ Baba's Gift

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