Bessie Head: Celebrating 70 Years
One-Day Colloquium: CALL FOR PAPERS

Thursday 12th July, 2007.
Centre for African Literary Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
9h30 - 17h00 (including lunch)
Fee to be announced.

It would have been Bessie Head's 70th birthday in July 2007. Some of her many readers from around the world have decided that this anniversary is a call for celebrations and have agreed that these will be held in four southern African places where she lived and worked: Serowe and Gaborone in Botswana; Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town in South Africa.

As Bessie Head was born in Pietermaritzburg and spent her childhood there, the colloquium at the Centre for African Literary Studies in Pietermaritzburg will have its main focus on childhood and its presence in her autobiographical and fictional writing.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal for this colloquium please send an abstract (200 words) to Margaret Daymond: daymond@ukzn.ac.za by February 27th 2007. An earlier expression of interest would also help in our planning.

The colloquium will take place on the day after the end of the annual AUETSA/ SAACLALS/ SAVAL conference in Durban: website, http://academic.sun.ac.za/english/AUETSA2007/. Delegates attending this conference will be welcome to attend the Bessie Head colloquium too, but this should be arranged as a separate registration through Margaret Daymond.

The organizers of the AUETSA /SAACLALS/ SAVAL conference have agreed that if more submissions for Bessie Head papers are sent in than can be accommodated during the colloquium, the overflow will form a special panel during the conference.

We hope that the colloquium will begin with a conversation between Patrick van Rensburg, the founder of Swaneng School and one of Bessie Head's long-standing friends in Serowe, and Gillian Stead-Eilersen, the author of the Bessie Head biography, Thunder Behind Her Ears.