Publications

Alan Paton. A biography

In this biography, Peter Alexander explores both the public figure of Alan Paton, and his private life, about which far less was known.  Against a backdrop of profound political changes and harassment of the apartheid government, Paton dedicated his life to the struggle against apartheid, continued to write, and…

Songs of Africa: Collected poems of Alan Paton edited

Although Alan Paton is best known as a novelist, he regarded himself as a ‘poet who wrote novels’.  In Songs of Africa, over 130 poems, songs and psalms, written over sixty years of Paton’s life, have been collected together.  The manuscripts of most of these poems are housed at…

Liberals against apartheid: a history of the Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953 – 1968

Randolph Vigne spent nearly a year researching this book at the Alan Paton Centre, where the archives of the Liberal Party of South Africa are held, and interviewing many former LPSA members in South Africa, and in the UK.  The book launch was held at the APC, where speeches…

AFRA: 20 years in the land rights struggle, 1979 – 1999

The Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) is an NGO in Pietermaritzburg which works with black rural people in KwaZulu-Natal who have been dispossessed of land, who are subject to insecure tenure, or who are marginalised and do not have the resources to access land.  This book covers not only…

A Literary Friendship: Alan Paton and Neville Nuttall

Jolyon Nuttall annotated the first part of his father’s diary, which was written over a sixty year period, from 1921 to 1982.  He extracted from the diary a record of the time that Paton and Neville Nuttall spent together as students at Natal University College in Pietermaritzburg, and as…

Concord

Concord is the annual newsletter of the Alan Paton Centre.  Its aim is to publicise the Centre, by reporting on the APC events which took place over the previous year, particularly the Alan Paton Lecture, which is often given front-page coverage, and the Heritage Day Seminar. Articles have also…