Lynn freed biography

Some years before apartheid came to an end, I was invited onto a morning television talk show in the San Francisco Bay Area, to appear there with a black South African writer. His memoir had recently been brought into the light by Oprah Winfrey, and he was now on the circuit with the mass-market paperback. It seemed obvious to me why they wanted me on the show: I was white; I’d grown up under apartheid and was to be held accountable for its injustices and sufferings.

“I can’t do it,” I said to my editor.

“But you must,” she said. “It’s wonderful exposure. And it’s been far too long since your last book.”

My last book, published three years earlier, had been an autobiographical novel about a Jewish girl growing up in a rather eccentric theatrical family in South Africa in the fifties and sixties. The book had garnered respectable reviews and caused outrage in South Africa, where the government considered a few semi-sexual scenes between whites and blacks dangerously provocative. So they’d canceled my appearances at local universities, and on radio and television.

To be put

Lynn Freed

Ph.D. , Columbia University
M.A. , Columbia University
A.B. , University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Lynn Freed was born and grew up in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student in English Literature, and has taught Literature and Creative Writing at Bennington College in Vermont, St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Oregon in Eugene, the University of Montana in Missoula and the University of Texas in Austin.

Professor Freed is the author of six novels, including The Servants' Quarters, House of Women, The Mirror, The Bungalow, Home Ground and Friends of the Family. She also has a collection of short fiction, The Curse of the Appropriate Man, and a collection of essays, Reading, Writing, & LeavingHome: Life on the Page.   Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsday, among others, and have been broadly anthologiz

Freed, Lynn (Ruth) 1945-

PERSONAL: Born July 18, 1945, in Durban, South Africa; immigrated to the United States in 1967, naturalized citizen, 1977; daughter of Harold Derrick (an actor) and Anne (a theatre director; maiden name, Moshal) Freed; children: Jessica Peta. Education: University of the Witwatersrand, B.A., 1966; Columbia University, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1972.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, William Morris Agency, Inc., 1325 Ave. of the Americas, New York, NY 10019. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, 1975—; currently University of California, Davis, professor of English.

MEMBER: PEN America, Authors Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS: Yaddo fellowships, 1985, 1987, 1991, 1994; WIT Fellow, Columbia University, 1969, Bay Area Book Reviewers Association award for fiction, and "Notable Books of the Year" listee, New York Times, both 1986, for Home Ground; MacDowell fellowships, 1986, 1987; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1987; Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Bellagio, 1989; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1990; Fellowship grant

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