Peter Merrington Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

I have a ceramic studio where I specialise at present in ceramic sundials.These are calibrated to work in the greater Cape Town area, but I can set up dials for any locality on request.The dial plates and gnomons are slip cast stoneware and they stand on an obelisk-shaped pedestal made in slabbed white stoneware. Clients can specify their own mottos and any other script, dedication, commemoration, etc, which I stamp into the surface.I am also designing a moon dial.I also make solar-powered birdbaths (with a submersible fountain pump that runs on a 2 watt solar panel - the pump keeps the water fresh and circulating; the moving water attracts birds).

Cape Town Area, South Africa

Sunbird Solar has designed a tough, flexible, practical solar light and power kit, for off-grid domestic use or safari, holiday cottages, field workers. Static or portable use. LED lights plus cell phone charging. 24V model for charging laptops. Preferred MOQ of 100. Capacity to produce 1000 pm. Contact me info@sunbirdsolar.com for pdf brochure, price, terms of supply.

Unlimited

Viral Flame is a broad project that I am starting. It is based on a series of e-books that I shall post on the net later this year (2013) but it is a lot more than writing.It is a project, maybe a campaign, for renewal and revision in the faith-based imagination, the idiom of Christian Protestant faith in the 21st century.My sense of things is broadly this:Protestantism as we know it (I am a dedicated Methodist) is a product of the Western Reformation. It grew along with the main influences of the European renaissance - printing, the extension of reading and writing, emergence of the idea of democratic nation states, rise of secular and empirical philosophy and science, and so on.These are the roots of our global modernity. In the most general terms, a progressive/liberal global modernity. That is the gift of history on which we stand.However, Protestantism is losing support. Within the global trend towards progressive/liberal modernity, the emphasis falls on sceptical rationalism, science, technology, and secularism. That is very well and good. But it has emptied out our communal sense of the substance of faith. I feel that many Protestant societies are now little more than social service societies, which is fine, but without the fire of desiring imagination that drives a genuine and transformed, transforming, faith life and society.For many reasons justly blended with the trend towards global modernity, many Protestants have become secularists. The trend invites that. Others have left to find different images, idiom, practice, insight and personal growth in New Age spiritual or psyche-oriented organisations or associations. Many have turned to the very just appeal of eastern practices.Viral Flame sees much common ground here and explores new idiom, new ways of Protestant faith. Dominant narratives have changed, images have changed, and how we interpret faith needs to follow suit. Metaphor is at the root of it - not mere ornament but 'metamorphosis'.

Cape Town

I published my first book of fiction, an episodic novel called 'Zebra Crossings, Tales from the Shaman's Record', with Jacana Media in 2008. In 2009 I received a writing fellowship from the University of Cape Town that enabled me to complete the first sequel. 'The Zombie and the Moon: more tales from the shaman's record' was published in July 2011. I am working on further sequels. I am also working on a documentary book about the founding of the SA state in 1910, and the topic of heritage. I also publish research articles on literary history in academic journals, and I publish poems and book reviews.

Cape Town, South Africa

My new novel, _The Zombie and the Moon: more tales from the Shaman's record_, is now published (July 2011) with Jacana Media (Cape Town and Johannesburg). It is the first sequel to my first book, _Zebra Crossings, tales from the shaman's record_, published by Jacana in 2008. The launch is at Kalk Bay Books, Kalk Bay (Cape Peninsula) on Friday 5 August 2011, 6 for 6.30 pm. Do come if you're in town.

Cape Town Area, South Africa

World Africa Writers is an online network and platform for all aspects of the culture of letters across the continent of Africa and the global African diaspora. It is not ethnic-based but premised on a wide global set of experience, history and heritage, talent and imagination, emerging out of and speaking towards a different global sphere than the transatlantic London-New York world of letters.worldafricawriters.org will be fully functional from September 2013. WAW commits itself to creativity and imagination, insight and analysis, networking, and the power of an informed, reading, writing civil society within the African global sphere of interest.To begin with, WAW seeks links. We invite authors, editors, publishers, journals and newspapers, libraries and archives, and all college or university teaching programmes that deal with African literature to send us your website links. We will have periodic newsletters, updates on competitions, prizes, literary festivals, from the Caribbean to Kenya and the Cape, and within communities of Africa-related or originated interest from London, New York, the world at large.We intend to become a premier site for networking, research, personal growth, expression and analysis within the global African sphere of writing and reading, and our first task is to accumulate a network of interested parties. We will bookmark your links and in due course set up reciprocal links on the WAW site.We want to showcase the work of illustrators and photographers, and will be setting up personal album and profile opportunitiesPlease visit our FB page and send ideas, contributions, links via the LinkedIn group, or direct to peter@merrington.co.zahttps://www.facebook.com/WorldAfricaWriters?fref=tsWAW will very shortly have a dedicated email and we shall be keeping you informed as we set up the fully functional site.Peter Merrington (Dr), literary historian affiliated to the University of the Western CapeCape Town, South Africa

Honorary position in the Faculty of Arts, UWC. I teach there on contract as and when required, and I receive research support from the faculty.

I teach courses in the English Department at UCT as and when required, on a contract basis.

I have served on three occasions as co-facilitator at the annual two-week writers' workshops of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Authors who win, or are shortlisted, for the Caine Prize, are invited to the annual workshop where they are enabled for two weeks, to develop new work with facilitators.

The Heritage Council of the Western Cape is a statutory body within the Western Cape Provincial Government, established in terms of the South African Heritage Resources Act of 1999. I served as a Council member and member of the Appeals Committee as well as the Archaeology, Palaeontology and Meteorites Committee.

I tutored and gave lectures to first-year students, and worked on the concept for my MA thesis.

I had a Rockefeller fellowship at the Center for the Study of Public Culture. I was tracking archival material relating to Jan Juta, South African artist and writer, who settled in New Jersey in the 1920s. I bought an old Honda CB550 and travelled 18 states, 10 000 miles, and worked at the New York Public Library, Princeton Library, and the Harry Ransome collection in Austin, Texas. I visited the Kiowa Ranch in Taos, New Mexico (Juta collaborated with DH Lawrence). I presented seminars at Emory on my work about the public imaginary and SA Union in 1910.

I was working on my doctoral thesis on SA Union, 1910, heritage, public culture, and memory.

Archival research in Cairo concerning newspapers, ephemera, issues relating to the Cape and South Africa, circa 1890-1920.

Ma, Phd, Literary History

Ba; Hons; Phd, English Literature And Literary History

My MA thesis was on Thomas Hardy's poetry, and my doctoral thesis was about the 'inventing of heritage' for the Union of South Africa.

Matriculation Certificate