Born 1 March 1931 in Cape Town, South African author Richard Rive was a novelist, editor, short story writer, and critic. Rive grew up in a ‘coloured’ working-class area of Cape Town called District Six, a segregated area he later wrote about in his widely acclaimed novel, ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six (1986). Rive himself was ‘coloured’, which in South African lexicon refers to a specific interracial identity particular to the area and distinct from Black Africans, considered to be a sort of creolisation of various African, white, and indigenous ethnicities. His father, an African-American ship-hand named Richardson Moore, left him and his ‘coloured’ mother a few months after his birth, never to be seen again.