FLOATING IN AN ANTIBUBBLE FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO SALFORD, a mosaic of pictures and stories

198pp., colour illus., paperback, Trenton, 2016

Brenda Cooper's book is a mosaic of literature, art, fiction and memoir, in which she draws on her experience of growing up in apartheid South Africa, on her Jewish family history, and on her research on African and postcolonial writing.

"The fragmented focis of the book is on African migration and Diaspora, coinciding with her own recent migration from Cape Town to Salford in Greater Manchester, with echoes of the migrations of her forebears from Eastern Europe and Russia to South Africa...The compass throughout the book is writers and artists, some white like Shapcott, most diasporic women, who are living in London, Antwerp or New York, but whose parents - one or both - were born in Africa." from the inside front cover

For many years Brenda Cooper was the Director of the Centre for African Studies and Professor in the English Department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now an Emeritus Professor. From 2009 to 2015 she lived in Salford, where she was an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Manchester. Currently she lives in Cape town where she runs Burnish, which organises workshops on academic writing. She is also the author of "A New Generation of South African Writers, migration, material culture and language: (2008).