Library Weekly

The ASCL's Library Weekly is our library’s weekly spotlight on African people and events. Inspired by the SciHiBlog, this service is based on information retrieved from Wikipedia and Wikidata and is completed with selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue.

N.B. The weeklies are not updated and reflect the state of information at a given point in time.

Library Weekly archive

Peter Abrahams

Peter Abrahams (Library of Congress: Carl Van Vechten) On 18 January 2017, South African-born novelist Peter Henry Abrahams Deras, commonly known as Peter Abrahams, died in Kingston, Jamaica, at the age of 97. His death is considered to have been murder.

Abrahams was born in 1919 in Vrededorp, a suburb of Johannesburg. In 1939, he found work as a stoker aboard a cargo ship and finally settled in London. There he worked as a clerk at a socialist bookstore and as editor for the communist newspaper 'The Daily Worker'. He soon became involved in the Pan-African movement. Although he left South Africa at the age of 20, most of his novels and short stories are based on his early life in South Africa. His novel 'Mine Boy,' for example, describes the trials of a naïve young black South African who leaves his home to work in the gold mines near Johannesburg and falls in love with a mixed-race woman.

In the mid-1950s Abrahams was commissioned to write a history of Jamaica (Jamaica: An Island Mosaic [1957]) . He eventually moved with his family to the island. There he became the editor of the 'West Indian Economist' and worked for Radio Jamaica.

In 1994, Peter Abrahams was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal for his writing and journalism by the Institute of Jamaica.

(Source: Wikipedia)