Mark Behr

Mark Behr is a South African author. He has written two books, both dealing in some way with apartheid and the history of South Africa.

Biography

Mark Behr was born in Mbuyu, his family's farm in rural Tanganyika, now Tanzania, in 1963. With the nationalisation of white-owned farms in East Africa, the Behr family emigrated to South Africa.

Behr attended the Drakensberg Boys' Choir School (later the setting for his novel Embrace), and then studied at the University of Stellenbosch.

He currently lives partly in South Africa, partly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the College of Santa Fe.

Bibliography

His first novel, Die Reuk van Appels (The Smell of Apples) was critically very well received. It dealt with the apartheid system as seen through the eyes of a young Afrikaner boy, Marnus. He followed this with Embrace, a novel about the early adolescence of Karl De Man, a 13-year-old Afrikaner, and in particular his awakening gay identity and relationships with both his choirmaster and his precocious, politically liberal best friend Dominic.