I Em Smiling

I Em Smiling is the personal and family autobiography of journalist and author Brian Pottinger. A former Editor and Publisher of the Sunday Times, he was present at all the major moments of the “peaceful revolution” which brought democracy to South Africa.

The author traces his family roots back to Revolutionary France and Edwardian England to understand what brought his two grandfathers to these shores. He provides a highly personalised account of growing up in apartheid South Africa and of his sometimes hilarious, often brutal, introduction to his journalistic calling.
I Em Smiling is not merely a political memoir. It is the story of a many-faceted life: student, soldier, taxi driver, railways fireman and ticket inspector, journalist, Editor, businessman, café owner and Chair of a family sugar farming enterprise.

Comment on contemporary and historical events, often acerbic, is laced with accounts of his more esoteric quests: discovering the remains of every last Knight’s Templar commanderie in the United Kingdom and France or in search of the last Caravaggio paintings to be found on the Mediterranean islands.

About the Author

Brian Pottinger was born in Durban in 1953. He was educated at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Harvard where he was a Fellow of the Nieman Foundation. He worked on newspapers in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg and is a former Editor and Publisher of the Sunday Times.

He became a media management specialist and worked throughout Anglophone Africa on media and entertainment businesses. He and his wife Susan, owned a café-bistro in a small Cornish coastal village before retiring to South Africa where he now lives on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast beside his beloved Indian Ocean.

Brian Pottinger married Susan Leila Wicker in 1977. They have two children, Simone and Christopher, and three grandchildren, Kirra, Sarah, Declan and Nathan.

This is his seventh book.