Show Notes
My guest today is the South African-born author, journalist and playwright Gillian Slovo.
Now 74, Gillian has written thirteen novels, including Red Dust which was made into a movie starring Chewitel Ejiofor and Hilary Swank, and Ice Road which was shortlisted for the women’s prize for fiction. She has also written four ‘verbatim’ plays including Grenfell which was a hit in the West End and transferred to broadway in 2024, won an Amnesty Award and been awarded a golden PEN.
In short Gillian’s career is a success by anyone’s definition.
But amongst this immense body of work, it is her memoir, Every Secret Thing, about what it means to grow up as the child of two political and cultural icons for which she is perhaps best known. Because Gillian is also the middle daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, two legends of the South African anti-apartheid movement. As a child, her living room was filled with political giants, including ANC leader Nelson Mandela.
Quite the legacy to grow up with. And it’s a legacy she continues to explore by way of fiction in her latest thriller Inheritance. In which a crime writer is driven to explore her family’s dark past when her estranged sister dies and leaves her an unlikely Inheritance.
Gillian joined me to talk about growing up surrounded by political giants, living with a family legacy and how she learnt not to be haunted by her mother’s murder. We also discussed the power of sisterhood, losing your adolesence, the freedom of recognising there is no one answer and how she’s embracing her 8th decade. Oh, and that time she went drinking with Martha Gelhorn!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Inheritance by Gillian Slovo, as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by Sam Baker.
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