Emma Gilbey Keller (b. ca. 1961) is an author and journalist, formerly based in New York City, now residing in London. She specialized in writing about women and women's issues. She has written two books: The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela (Jonathan Cape, 1993) [1] and The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went From Career to Family and Back Again (Bloomsbury, 2008) [2] [3]
Gilbey Keller was born in London, the daughter of businessman Anthony Gilbey and journalist Lenore Gilbey. She was educated at New Hall School, and King's College London, and was a teacher before switching to journalism. Her decision to switch careers was influenced by the death of her mother who was murdered in New York in 1983 in a random hotel break in. [4] Gilbey Keller moved to New York in 1986 and lived there till 2022.
She is married to Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times, then of The Marshall Project, and has two daughters, Molly and Alice.
Gilbey Keller's first job in journalism was at Roll Call newspaper on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. and from there she went to work in the investigative unit of ABC News. In early 1990 she moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, and began writing features for The Weekly Mail. Assigned to cover Winnie Mandela's trial on kidnapping and assault charges for the paper, [5] she was eventually commissioned to write Mrs. Mandela's biography. Following its publication Gilbey Keller became a feature writer for the London Sunday Times , specializing in English and American trials and headline crimes.
Gilbey Keller was then commissioned to write a book about the Gloucestershire serial killing couple, Fred and Rosemary West, but left the project after West contacted her to cooperate. She was told not to trust him by members of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, VA. [6] She became the New York correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph and a contributing editor to the Telegraph Magazine. Over the years, she has written for The Spectator , The Literary Review , Vanity Fair , The New Yorker , Slate and The New York Times .
Gilbey Keller was an early contributor to the newly created Guardian US from 2012 to 2014 and while there created The Living Hour, a regular web-based discussion about the way we live. [7]
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, also known as Winnie Mandela, was a South African anti-apartheid activist and the second wife of Nelson Mandela. A convicted kidnapper, she served as a Member of Parliament from 1994 to 2003, and from 2009 until her death, and was a deputy minister of arts and culture from 1994 to 1996. A member of the African National Congress (ANC) political party, she served on the ANC's National Executive Committee and headed its Women's League. Madikizela-Mandela was known to her supporters as the "Mother of the Nation".
Albertina SisuluOMSG was a South African anti-apartheid activist. A member of the African National Congress (ANC), she was the founding co-president of the United Democratic Front. In South Africa, where she was affectionately known as Ma Sisulu, she is often called a mother of the nation.
Naomie Melanie Harris is an English actress. She started her career when she was a child, appearing in the television series Simon and the Witch in 1987. She portrayed Selena in the zombie film 28 Days Later (2002), the witch Tia Dalma in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films, Winnie Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013), and Frances Barrison / Shriek in Sony's Spider-Man Universe film Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021). She portrayed Eve Moneypenny in the James Bond films Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015), and No Time to Die (2021).
Emma Harriet Nicholson, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is a British politician, who has been a life peer since 1997. She was elected as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Torridge and West Devon in 1987, before switching to the Liberal Democrats in 1995. She was also the Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament for South East England from 1999 to 2009. In 2016, she announced she was re-joining the Conservative Party "with tremendous pleasure". In 2017, Baroness Nicholson was appointed as Prime Minister's Trade Envoy for Kazakhstan.
Helen Suzman, OMSG, DBE was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician. She represented a series of liberal and centre-left opposition parties during her 36-year tenure in the whites-only, National Party-controlled House of Assembly of South Africa at the height of apartheid.
Bill Keller is an American journalist. He was the founding editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit that reports on criminal justice in the United States. Previously, he was a columnist for The New York Times, and served as the paper's executive editor from July 2003 until September 2011. On June 2, 2011, he announced that he would step down from the position to become a full-time writer. Jill Abramson replaced him as executive editor.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North–South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete.
Brenda, Lady Maddox was an American writer and biographer, who spent most of her adult life living and working in the UK, from 1959 until her death. She is best known for her biographies, including of Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce, and for her semi-autobiographical book, The Half-Parent: Living with Other People's Children.
Emma Christina Tennant FRSL was an English novelist and editor of Scottish extraction, known for a post-modern approach to her fiction, often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. She also published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy.
Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer and scholar.
Marike de Klerk was the First Lady of South Africa, as the wife of State President Frederik Willem de Klerk, from 1989–1994. She was also a politician of the former governing National Party in her own right. De Klerk was murdered in her Cape Town home in 2001.
The African National Congress Women's League (ANCWL) is an auxiliary women's political organization of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa. This organization has its precedent in the Bantu Women's League, and it oscillated from being the Women's Section to the Women's League from its founding, through the exile years, and in a post-apartheid South Africa. After women were allowed to become members of the ANC in 1943, the ANCWL was created as the means by which Black South African women could contribute to the national liberation struggle by channeling Black women's political activity into the ANC by way of the ANCWL.
James Seipei, also known as Stompie Moeketsi or Stompie Sepei, was a teenage United Democratic Front (UDF) activist from Parys, South Africa. He and three other boys were kidnapped on 29 December 1988 by members of Winnie Mandela's bodyguards. He was murdered on 1 January 1989, the only one of the boys to be killed.
Charlene Leonora Smith is a South African journalist, published author of 14 books, and is an authorized biographer of Nobel Peace Prize winner, and former South African President, Nelson Mandela. She is a communications and marketing consultant, and writing teacher, who lives and works in the United States.
Winnie Mandela is a 2011 South African-Canadian historical drama film starring Jennifer Hudson and Terrence Howard as Winnie and Nelson Mandela. Based on Anne Marie du Preez Bezrob's biography Winnie Mandela: A Life, the film is directed by Darrell Roodt and co-stars Wendy Crewson, Elias Koteas and Justin Strydom. Image Entertainment released the film in theaters on September 6, 2013. It received generally negative reviews.
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.
Emma Barnett is a British broadcaster and journalist who presented Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 from 2021 until 2024.
Princess Zenani Mandela-Dlamini is a South African diplomat and traditional aristocrat. She is the sister-in-law of the King of eSwatini, Mswati III, and the daughter of Nelson Mandela and his former wife, Winnie Mandela.
Zindziswa "Zindzi" Mandela, also known as Zindzi Mandela-Hlongwane, was a South African diplomat and poet, and the daughter of anti-apartheid activists and politicians Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Zindzi was the youngest and third of Nelson Mandela's three daughters, including sister Zenani Mandela.
Sisonke Msimang is a South African writer, activist and political analyst based in Perth, Western Australia, whose focus is on race, gender, and politics. She is known for her memoir Always Another Country: A memoir of exile and home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018), a biography of anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.