Mark Gevisser is a South African author and journalist best known for his biography of Thabo Mbeki, his country's second democratically-elected president. After graduating from Yale in 1987 magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature, Gevisser worked in New York, writing for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990. His work has been published in the Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Sunday Independent, The New York Times Magazine, The Observer, The Guardian and The New York Times. Gevisser's book on the South African president, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, won the 2008 Alan Paton Award; his political profiles were collected as Portraits of Power: Profiles in a New South Africa, published in 1996; and he co-edited Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa with Edwin Cameron. An abridged version of the Mbeki biography, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, was published in 2009, with an epilogue briefly detailing Mbeki's usurpation at the hands of Jacob Zuma. 

January 1st, 1964 in Johannesburg (Age 60)