Edwin Cameron – författare

Defiant Desire records the lives of lesbian and gay South Africans of all races as they have lived in the face of censure, denial and oppression. The history of gay identity in South Africa is here in its past and present aspects: from a drag salon in Woodstock to a gay "shebeen" in kwaThema; from a church in a Pretoria nightclub to Johannesburg's lesbian and gay pride march; from Afrikaans love poetry to new activism. The book is a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and indispensable for those interested in the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.

In Justice, Cameron explains and defends the role of the law in South Africa's continuing transition. He draws on his own life experience - of poverty, of a youth spent in a childrens home, of his differentness and of stigma - to illustrate the power and the limitations of the law. Cameron argues his case that the Constitution offers South Africans our best chance for a just society.

When Edwin Cameron announced to a stunned local and international media that he - one of South Africa's most prominent citizens - was himself living with the HIV/AIDS virus cutting swathes through the population of the continent, the impact was immediate. In Witness to AIDS, Edwin Cameron's compelling memoir, he grapples with the meaning of HIV/AIDS: for him as he confronts the possibility of his own lingering death, and for all of us in facing up to one of the most desperate challenges of our time. In his intensely personal account of survival, Cameron blends elements of his destitute childhood with his daily duties as a senior judge and international human rights lawyer, while focusing always on the epidemic's central issues : stigma, unjust discrimination, and, most vitally, the life-and-death question of access to treatment. Cameron's remarkable story of his own survival in an epidemic that has cost millions of lives is at once moving and uplifting, sobering and ultimately hopeful. 'This book will be a major contribution by a courageous South African towards that quest for a better life for all.'- Nelson Mandela 'If truth is beauty, this relentlessly brilliant and hopeful book is beautiful. It is a text to live by, if we aspire to the possibility of a better life for all...in a world widely threatened by HIV/Aids.' - Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1991

In Witness to AIDS, Edwin Cameron grapples with the meaning of HIV/AIDS as he confronts the possibility of his own lingering death, and for all of us in facing up to one of the most desperate challenges of our time.