Hope, Christopher

(1944- )

   Born in Johannesburg, he grew up in Pretoria, was educated at the universities of Witwatersrand and Natal, and worked as a journalist. He came to London in 1975 and worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer and broadcaster. His first novel, A Separate Development (1980), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction. Many of his novels relate to the political and cultural situation in South Africa. The Love Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky (1993), a collection of short stories written for BBC Radio, describes childhood on a small 1950s housing estate in the Transvaal. White Boy Running (1988) is his autobiography. He has written about post-Cold War Russia in Moscow! Moscow! (1990), about the United Kingdom in Darkest England (1996), and about Languedoc (south France) in Signs of the Heart (1999). He has won seven major literary awards. His book of poems Cape Drives (1974) received the Cholmondeley Award. Some of his poems: "Lines on a Boer War Pin-up Girl Seen in the Falcon Hotel, Bude," "The Country of the Black Pig," "The Flight of the White South Africans," "Englishmen" (dramatized and broadcast by the BBC [1986]).

   Sources: British Council Arts (http://www.contemporarywriters.com). Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times. Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney, ed. Faber and Faber, 1996. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Penguin Book of Southern African Verse. Stephen Gray, ed. Penguin Books, 1989.