Author of
How to be a Revolutionary (Verso, 2021)
Winner of
UJ Prize (2023)
Sunday Times Literary Award (2023)
C.A. Davids works as a writer and indie publisher of children’s books. Her debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in South Africa in 2013. It was shortlisted for the Edinburgh Book Fest’s First Book Award, the University of Johannesburg Debut Writing Prize and the SALA First-time Published Author Award, amongst others. Her indie children’s publishing house, everychild books, has produced The Hair Fair (by CA Davids, illustrated by Mary-An Hampton) and Mizz President (by Mapule Mohulatsi, illustrated by Mary-An Hampton). Davids has a Masters in Creative Writing, a degree in economics and a postgraduate qualification in marketing from the University of Cape Town. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa, but has also called Shanghai, China, New Jersey in the USA and Basel in Switzerland home.
Davids’s professional career has included positions as the marketing manager for The Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, communications manager for the Alexander Kasser Theatre in New Jersey, USA, and advertising and promotions manager for Levi Strauss South Africa. She has written non-fiction for the South African Sunday Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation (The Cultural Frontline) and magazines VISI and Taste, website Africa is a Country, amongst others.
C. A. Davids
Books by C. A. Davids
How to be a Revolutionary (Verso, 2021)
Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises.
At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes--who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript--chunk by chunk--appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend...
Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising--and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes' confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet's time in Shanghai--How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It's also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.