Awardwinning BBC correspondent pens must-read book
JOHANNESBURG - His first book The Mayor of Mogadishu was launched on 11 October at Love Books in Melville.
Andrew Harding has been a foreign correspondent for the past 25 years and has been working abroad in countries such as Russia, Caucasus, Asia and Africa.
His television and radio reports have won him international awards and recognition. He’s been a BBC Africa correspondent since 2009.
His first book The Mayor of Mogadishu was launched on 11 October at Love Books in Melville.
Harding said he studied literature and has always been an avid reader. While still a reporter, it took him five years to write the book on a tight deadline and without the platform to dig deeper into a subject or a character.
He credits one of his career highlights when he covered the parliamentary rebellion in Moscow and worked undercover in Burma and Zimbabwe.
“I’ve been wanting to write a book for many years but the news is a time-consuming business and it was only recently that I managed to take some time off to focus on writing Mayor of Mogadishu. This is my first book, I’ve caught the bug and am already researching a second fiction book. A story about murder and its aftermath, set here in South Africa,” he explained.
The Mayor of Mogadishu tells the life story of a man named Tarzan. He was born into a poor family and left in an orphanage in 1960. Tarzan falls in love with an upper-class girl and they start a family together. They are then forced to escape the civil war in Somalia and flee to London. Harding added that he hoped he captured Somalia’s challenges and Tarzan’s life story in a meaningful way.
Besides covering war stories around the world, he is also a father to three teenage boys. He said in his spare time he loves watching movies, sailing and anything involving the sea and the mountains.
