Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago); Intimate Stranger (Archipelago); Notes from the Middle World (Haymarket Books)
As a writer, South African-born Breyten Breytenbach is an activist. As an activist he functions as something like a conscience. As a participant in the global response to apartheid, he was imprisoned for seven years, and his writing comes from the anguished nightmares of his imprisonment. His is the art of passionate dissent; his prose and poetry are in service of a more "human" human race.