Conversations with myself

Nelson Mandela is still widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Here, after a lifetime of putting pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he opens his personal archive, which offers an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life. Conversations with Myself gives readers access to the private man behind the public figure: from letters written in the darkest hours of Mandela’s twenty-seven years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished sequel to Long Walk to Freedom. In these pages he is neither an icon nor a saint; here he is like you and me. An intimate journey from the first stirrings of his political conscience to his galvanising role on the world stage, Conversations with Myself is a rare chance to spend time with Nelson Mandela the man, in his own voice: direct, clear, private.

Nelson Mandela was born in the Transkei, South Africa, on 18 July 1918. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance against the ruling National Party’s apartheid policies before being arrested in August 1962. He was released in 1990 after more than twenty-seven years of incarceration. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. He is the author of the international bestseller Long Walk to Freedom and its sequel, Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years. He died on 5 December 2013, at the age of ninety-five.