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Articles by Alistair Mackay
AI and tech bros don’t get to decide our future
I have a cap with the words “Please don’t talk to me about AI – I’ll kill myself” embroidered onto it. I wear it to go running and, by now, my friends know not to mention AI to me, but obviously it hasn’t worked to calm my anxieties. The dread persists. And yet we’re not allowed to be afraid of AI, everyone tells us, because “it’s here to stay”. Don't want to see this?
See all 45 books longlisted for the 2025 Sunday Times Literary Awards
The Sunday Times Literary Awards has announced the longlists for South Africa’s most prestigious annual literary awards. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the non-fiction award and 24 years of the fiction prize in partnership with Exclusive Books.
Story of a new generation of South Africans
BOOK EXCERPT Critically acclaimed author Alistair Mackay’s new novel, The Child, is a fresh and insightful addition to queer literature in South Africa. Read an excerpt. After suffering a mental breakdown and losing his job at a New York advertising agency, a young man returns to Cape Town with his husband, Adrian. It’s 2018 and Cape Town is about to run out of water. This isn’t the homecoming they dreamed of, but the couple is determined to hold on to hope.
Jacket Notes: Imagining another childhood
30 June 2024 - 00:00 Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package. I started writing The Child during lockdown. A friend of mine invited me to join a writing group made up, mostly, of South Africans scattered across the world.
Adopting a new relationship
Cape Town looks dry from the plane. I try to point this out to Adrian beside me but I’m conscious of speaking very slowly and slurring my words. I’m heavily sedated, with beta blockers and sleeping pills and booze. Some homeopathic calming chews as well. I take combinations that are not recommended, in doses that are not recommended.
A poetic, resonant nightmare about LGBT rights and climate change
An important disclaimer, before we go further – there is nothing remotely realistic about the climate science in Alistair Mackay’s sensitively written, beautiful queer cli-fi (climate change fiction) novel It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. Fifteen years or so into the future, the Cape Flats have suddenly been flooded by rising oceans. Cape Town’s skyscrapers are inundated at ground level.
Maverick Life: Nothing Foreign-Language about Parasite
'Parasite' movie poster. (Image: supplied) Set in Seoul, South Korea, Parasite is billed as a dark comedy and a thriller, but it’s also obviously a commentary on Korean inequality.
Unfairest Cape? The hunt for affordable housing
There is a narrative out there about ‘occupiers,’" says Karen Hendricks from her bedroom in the nursing quarters of the old Woodstock Hospital. "People think they’ll be shot or robbed. They think it’ll be so dirty in here. But every public toilet has a roster. Our people do their duty. We cleaned up this building.
Brand Politics: Talk is cheap
by Alistair Mackay (@almackay) Nothing seems to have done more to shift the narrative and catch the world’s attention on the Syrian refugee crisis than that heart-breaking photograph of a dead child on the beaches of the Mediterranean. “A picture is worth a thousand words” goes the idiom, but it’s worth a whole lot more than that.
City brands & the ‘world-class’ positioning myth
by Alistair Mackay (@almackay) In our globalised world, countries and cities compete in an almost-open market for investment and tourism. That makes it as important for them to have coherent and compelling brands as it is in the private sector. But South African cities are struggling to define their brands, pulled as they are between wanting to seem “world-class” and wanting to seem responsive to all who live in them.
Brand Politics: To lead or mimic? That is the brand question
by Alistair Mackay (@almackay) The Castle Lager ads of the 1990s put forward a vision of South Africa that was far removed from the lived reality of most citizens then. That kind of footage seems cheesy and clichéd now, but seeing a genuinely and happily multiracial society back then must have seemed like looking into some dreamlike utopia. It was a vision to unite and inspire SA in a time of trepidation, polarisation and mistrust.
Brand Politics: The gift of protest
by Alistair Mackay (@almackay) “A customer that complains is a good customer,” said an entrepreneur while explaining his business idea to me recently. It’s definitely the right attitude to have, and an attitude that would do our politics a huge amount of good. South Africans don’t change their votes much. In the five general elections we’ve had since democracy started, only two provinces have ever switched allegiances: the Western Cape (in 1999 and again in 2009) and KwaZulu-Natal (in 2004).
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