Richard Jurgens

Photo of Richard Jurgens © 2012 by Susan Janssen

RICHARD JURGENS (b. Johannesburg 1960) was the founding editor of Amsterdam Weekly. Years before, during the 1980s, he worked with the African National Congress (ANC) in various parts of Africa. And in 2000 published a memoir of his experiences entitled The Many Houses of Exile, which attracted considerable attention. ‘An absorbing, sophisticated and occasionally harrowing commentary’, according to the Mail and Guardian. Jurgens’ first novel, The Stolen Scenario, tells the story of the colourful life and career of an eccentric expatriate in Amsterdam and other parts of the world. It was serialized in Litnet magazine between 2009 and 2011, and is currently being prepared for print publication. One Summer, a cycle of poems about a passionate relationship between a young woman and an older man, appeared in 2010. The following year his 'South African translation' of part one of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' (viz., a radical interpretation of the spirit of revolutionary South Africa in the 1980s) was published in the online literary periodical Ol' Chanty. Jurgens is presently researching a novel based on certain prophetic events that took place in the earliest days of Johannesburg—‘the Eldorado of the Western world’ at that time, as Gandhi put it; and the ultimate gold rush town. He is also busy with a new book of poetry, Tango Solo.