E-mail us a comment on this writer. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) About the author In his student years at the University of Natal, funding his studies by working as a stoker on the railways, Michael Cawood Green achieved some recognition as a protest-oriented singer-songwriter. After completing his Masters Degree at Stanford University, California, he lectured English at the then Rand Afrikaans University, performing as a solo musician and in a range of bands in his free time. A Commonwealth scholarship then took Green to the University of York to study for his doctorate. On returning to South Africa he went to the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban where he is currently a Senior Professor and Head of English. Apart from many scholarly articles and contributions to anthologies of creative work, Green is the author a literary study, Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction, and Sinking: A Verse Novella, for which he was awarded the University of Natal Book Prize in the ‘Popular’ Book Category in 1998. In 1999 he was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship and spent a year in London as a Visiting Scholar and Researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He regularly contributes to national and international conferences and colloquia, and has been an invited speaker at academic events in the UK, the USA, Germany, Italy, and Poland. He is also one of the founders of the extremely successful Poetry Africa and Time of the Writer Festivals held annually in Durban. Michael Cawood Green has received many awards, including three awards for excellence in teaching at his Alma Mater and a Commonwealth Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1998–1999. Author’s other published work includes    •   Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction, Witwatersrand University Press, 1997    •   Sinking: A Verse Novella, Penguin, 1997 Writing about researching For the Sake of Silence, the author recounts: “The travel in southern Africa cost me two cars which, for all their many virtues, were never designed for the tracking down of each of the missions and most of the day stations established by the Trappists of Mariannhill – starting at the monastery near my home town of Pinetown, heading up the motorway through the toll plaza which bears the name of Mariannhill (the monastery’s founder was implacably opposed to the tolls put on colonial roads) … “I celebrated this extraordinary stroke of research fortune [being taken on a tour of Mariawald Monastery in Germany] with pea soup served at the refectory outside the enclosure, into which a large frankfurter was dropped for those not of a suitably vegetarian Trappist persuasion. This I washed down with my first Trappist beer, the merits of which I can best illustrate by reporting that I sang loudly all the way along the three-mile footpath.” Title published by Umuzi For the Sake of Silence home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za