Previous books include A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir.
Mark Gevisser was born in 1964 in South Africa to a family of Lithuanian Jewish heritage.
[1] He graduated from Yale University in 1987 magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature.
Gevisser started his career in New York, where he worked for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990.
Gevisser joined the new political party Rise Mzansi in February 2024 as its 'strategic communications' advisor, disclosing this in a New York Review of Books article in October 2024, 3 months after the end of South Africa's 2024 elections in which the party obtained 0.42% of the national vote.