My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah

Denis Hirson has lived in France since 1975, yet has remained true to the title of one of his prose poems, 'The long-distance South African'. Most of his nine books, both poetry and prose, are concerned with the memory of the apartheid years in South Africa. Two of his previous titles, The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (the Boxer) were South African bestsellers. His most recent books are Ma langue au chat, sub-titled 'tortures and delights of an English-speaker in Paris', and a book of conversations with William Kentridge, Footnotes for the Panther.

Hilarious and heart-breaking. Hirson has the ability to evoke not just the city of his childhood, but his own thirteen-year-old voice and imagination of the world - with its perceptions, terrors and incomprehensions