Sean O'Toole
Sean O’Toole (b. 1968, Pretoria) is a Cape Town-based journalist, critic and writer. Editor of the quarterly print magazine, Art South Africa, he writes a weekly photographic column for the Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest circulation newspaper, and a bi-monthly art column for frieze magazine (named after a song by pop diva Brenda Fassie, ‘Weekend Special’). His debut literary work, a collection of short fictions, appeared in 2006 under the wholly un-exportable title, The Marquis of Mooikloof and Other Stories, and included a story that won the 2006 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award. Widely published as a journalist, in the last year he has written artist profiles and catalogue essays on Simon Gush, Amar Kanwar, Santu Mofokeng and Guy Tillim, amongst others. He is currently working on a reference book of post-war South African photography, due for publication in late 2011. He expresses kinship with another inadequately qualified South African critic, Lionel Abrahams, who wrote of himself: ‘I am a critic without scholarship or theory, an editor without professionalism, a publisher without organisation or capital...’ Ditto.
