What is the place of the artist and writer in a globalised world? asks one of South Africa's iconic writers, Breyten Breytenbach. He attempts to answer this and other questions in the essays that make up his latest book, Notes from the Middle World.

In dialogue with the voices of the dead and the living - Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama - artist, activist and writer Breytenbach's new collection traces the collisions among utopia and disaster, political trauma, and the renewal of hope.

Notes from the Middle World is a beautiful and heart-wrenching book. Against the conformity of power, Breytenbach takes readers on a journey through the 'Middle World', an imagined space beyond borders and exile, toward an embracing vision of justice for the 'un-citizens' post-modernity has dispossessed.