Nelson Mandela

Ariel Dorfman to give Mandela Lecture

2 June 2010

World-acclaimed Chilean-American author, human rights activist and professor of literature and Latin-American studies, Ariel Dorfman, will present the Eighth Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at Johannesburg's Linder Auditorium on 31 July.

The author of numerous novels, plays, poems, essays and films in both Spanish and English will speak on the theme "Memory and Justice" at the 2010 Annual Lecture.

Previous Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture speakers include Nobel Peace Laureates Muhammad Yunus, Wangari Maathai, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kofi Anan, former presidents Bill Clinton and Thabo Mbeki, and President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

Achmat Dangor, chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said earlier this year that the foundation was "thrilled to have a speaker of the stature of Ariel Dorfman. His life and work speaks to what we at the Nelson Mandela Foundation are doing through our Centre of Memory and Dialogue."

Dorfman served as the cultural adviser to Salvador Allende, Chile's president from 1970 to 1973. The democratically elected Allende died during the 1973 coup staged by Augusto Pinochet. This coup also resulted in the death and disappearance of thousands of Chileans and forced Dorfman into exile.

His internationally acclaimed books have been translated into more than 40 languages. His fiction includes the novels Mascara, Hard Rain, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Konfidenz and The Nanny and the Iceberg. Nobel prize-winner José Saramago described Dorfman's novel, Blake's Therapy, as the novel Kafka would write if he were alive today.

Among his plays – performed in more than 100 countries – are Death and the Maiden, Reader and Widows, all of which have won global acclaim and been performed around the world.

SAinfo reporter