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Jean Hey, writer from South Africa, Homepage.
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Photo by Susan Wilson
Sometimes you have to leave what is safe — including family and friends, and even your country — to find yourself. I write about this again and again, in personal essays and in my novel. My central characters are outsiders who struggle to stay true to themselves even if it means flouting family expectations or society’s norms. I grew up in South Africa during apartheid and emigrated to America in my late twenties in search of a way of life that would allow me to be more authentic, and to live in a society that was less blatantly racist.
My essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Chicago Tribune, Solstice Literary Magazine, the L.A. Review of Books, Arrowsmith Journal, The MacGuffin and elsewhere. In addition, I was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for Emerging Writers and The Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction.
I received a dual MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Writing Seminars of Bennington College where I was awarded the Sven Birkerts Prize for Nonfiction.
While in South Africa I worked as a newspaper journalist first in Johannesburg for The Star and then in Cape Town for the Cape Argus. I also served as a foreign correspondent for the education supplement of the London newspaper, The Times, writing feature stories that covered unrest in black schools and discrepancies between black and white education.
My wife and I live in Boston and Truro on Cape Cod, where I have a shed in which to write, and beaches nearby to walk our Standard Poodle. I still visit South Africa whenever I can.