The Jive Talker

A bawdy, brilliant and heartbreaking memoir by the award-winning Malawian-born artist. With exuberant prose, a cast of extraordinary characters and a rebellious spirit, Samson Kambalu tells the story of how a little boy obsessed with fashion, football, Nietzsche and Michael Jackson won a free education at the Kamuzu Academy ('The Eton of Africa') and began his long journey to art school, and international artistic and academic success. The son of a philosophising, hard-drinking, poorly paid hospital manager, Kambalu's award-winning conceptual work is now shown in galleries across the world and still evokes that childhood landscape of literary excitement, family chaos and music; post-colonial injustice, poverty and Aids. 'A book filled with wonder, humour and hope. It is a magnificent achievement.' Aminatta Forna, Sunday Telegraph 'Read Kambalu, cry, clap your hands.' Iain Finlayson, The Times 'A truly original book.'Pride Magazine

Auteur

Samson Kambalu was born in 1975 in Malawi. He lives and works in Oxford where he is an Associate Professor of Fine Art and a lifelong fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University. Kambalu is an artist and writer working in a variety of media, including site-specific installation, video, performance and literature. His work is autobiographical and approaches art as an arena for critical thought and sovereign activities. It fuses aspects of the Nyau culture of the Chewa, the anti-reification theories of the Situationist movement and the Protestant tradition of inquiry, criticism and dissent. Kambalu has won research fellowships with Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution. His work Antelope will appear on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth in 2022.