Tony Voss

Tony Voss was born in Swakopmund in 1935. He was educated at St George's Grammar School, Cape Town; Rhodes University, Grahamstown; and the University of Washington, Seattle. His interests were formed by his southern African upbringing, his parents' faith, and imagination - from songs of the First World War and swing, to Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse. "Like most Southern Africans," he says, "I grew up in a multilingual community and I appreciate, enjoy and admire other languages, as they have been instrumental in my developing a sense of the social answerability of any human activity." He taught English in universities until he retired from the service of the then University of Natal in 1995. The Mushroom Summer of Skipper Darling is his first book.