Prose Writer
She is best known for her book Country of My Skull, which chronicled the TRC. With Krog's reluctant permission, the book was later dramatised for the screen by Ann Peacock resulting in a film of the same name. Released in the United States as In My Country, it stars Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche. While the film was thought to have its "heart and politics in the right place" it was otherwise panned by the Washington Post as a "formula romance", in which Binoche fails at the Afrikaans accent and Jackson's character, Langston Whitfield, lacks credibility as a Post reporter.
A Change of Tongue, her second work of prose in English, recounts ten years of evolution after South Africa's first democratic elections. A post-modern blend of fiction, poetry, and reportage it explores the surprising and predictable changes that South Africans have made since abandoning apartheid. At times humorous, she weaves strands of autobiography with the stories of others to document struggles for identity, truth and salvation. The title of the book has political and private meanings: the diminishing role of Afrikaans in public discourse is reflected in her own flight into English as the vernacular of her work.
There was this goat, written with Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele and published by KZN Press in March 2009, investigates the Truth Commission testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile.
Read more about this topic: Antjie Krog
Famous quotes containing the words prose and/or writer:
“Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more.”
—James Kenneth Stephens (1882–1950)
“What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)