Robert Berold
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Robert Berold, (born 1948) is a South African author and editor.
Berold was born in Johannesburg, but has lived for the last twenty years in the Eastern Cape. He is the author of three books of poems : The Door to the River (Bateleur, 1984), The Fires of the Dead (Carrefour, 1989) and Rain Across a Paper Field (Gecko Poetry, 1999) and his poems have appeared in several South African anthologies.
Denis Hirson wrote about his work:
- "his pared down naming of essential things around him, the physicality of the encounter between words and local environment, free of intellectual artifice, along with an increasing meditative simplicity, combine to give his voice its distinctive sound in South Africa today."
From 1989 to 1999 Berold edited the poetry journal New Coin, publishing much of the groundbreaking new poetry being written in South Africa in the 1990s. His anthology from New Coin was published in 2002 as It All Begins : poems from postliberation South Africa, and followed in 2003 by a compilation of interviews with poets titled South African Poets on Poetry.
Berold makes his living as a writer and editor of technical and environmental books, and does some part time teaching of creative writing and literary journalism at Rhodes University. He runs the small poetry press Deep South.
From 2005 to 2006 Berold taught English writing at Zhejiang University, People's Republic of China. He also organized various campus-wide seminars on English poetry during this period.
