Vincent Gray

Biography

As a son of a miner, I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg. I matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, I was conscripted into the South African Defence Force for compulsory national military service when I was 17 years old. After my military service, I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree I worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. As an obligatory member of the South African Citizen Miltary Force, I was called up to do 3-month camps on the 'Border' which was the theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War'. In between postgraduate university studies I also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales rep. In my career as an academic, I was a molecular biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I lectured courses in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and evolutionary biology. On the research side, I was involved in genomics, and plant and microbial biotechnology. I also conducted research into the genomics of strange and weird animals known as entomopathogenic nematodes. I retired in 2019, however, I am currently an honorary professor at the University of the Witwaterand and I also work as a research writing consultant for the University of Johannesburg.

Where to find Vincent Gray online

Facebook: Facebook profile

Books

The Transaction
Price: Free! Words: 15,180. Language: Commonwealth English. Published: March 4, 2022 . Categories: Essay » Literature
Raghavee and Martin each give their individual accounts of the same story. On the night that their shop burnt down Raghavee's father died of a heart attack. When her mother and siblings decided to relocate to Newcastle in Natal, Raghavee moved in with Martin, a white boy. She became his housekeeper. Cohabitation of whites and Indians under the same roof was illegal under apartheid race laws.
Love at the End of Time
Price: Free! Words: 77,370. Language: English. Published: January 1, 2022 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
This novel is the sequel to Jo’burg Sex Love and Marx. The protagonist Josh bids farewell to Millicent who is immigrating to Canada. After Millicent leaves, a love affair develops between him and Gazala, his postdoc student. Following the successive waves of the Covid pandemic, South Africa undergoes an apocalyptic collapse due to the exorable processes of what Josh refers to as zombification.
Jo’burg: Sex, Love, and Marx
Price: Free! Words: 59,630. Language: British English. Published: December 16, 2021 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary, Fiction » Erotica » Literary Erotica
Following the passing away of his parents, Gavin Swift moves into a flat in the inner-city of Johannesburg (Jo’burg). Communism has collapsed, apartheid is on the verge of collapsing, the whole world was in a state of transition. On his night walks, his fate merges with that of the city.
A Posh White Woman
Price: Free! Words: 5,790. Language: English. Published: April 8, 2021 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
There was another side to Hannah Zeeman. As a femme lesbian she found herself cruising the shopping malls after inadvertently discovering her talent as a pick-up artist. Her journey as a seductress, picking up older women and so on, has a comical and philosophical dimension.
Between Nostalgia and Dystopia
Price: Free! Words: 209,400. Language: English. Published: March 7, 2021 . Categories: Fiction » Science fiction » Utopias & dystopias
Throughout human history the formation of oligarchies have been driven by an innate dystopian impulse. In the post-Palaeolithic world egalitarianism can only exist as a myth. Gavin Swift who becomes Joshua Swift becomes increasingly aware of the creeping onset of an apocalypse and prepares for the inevitable doomsday as things begin to unravel in Southern Africa.
Reclassified
Price: Free! Words: 147,200. Language: English. Published: November 21, 2020 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Following the revolutionary overthrow of Apartheid Hannah made the following confession to her brother: I have been officially Coloured since 1990. To be honest with you, in my heart, especially during the revolutionary struggle in the 1980s, and following my arrest, I began to self-identify as Coloured, it was this that kept me going, it was this which motivated me to take the huge risks.
The Legacy of Jomogee's Obsession
Price: Free! Words: 98,260. Language: English. Published: November 18, 2020 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary, Fiction » Erotica » Literary Erotica
Joe Magee began his career during a time of severe economic depression and poverty, circumstances which also forced many immigrants to resort to crime in order to earn a livelihood. They became involved in all kinds of racketeering, bootlegging, illegal gambling and prostitution
The Dark Universe of Complicity
Price: Free! Words: 68,360. Language: English. Published: October 7, 2020 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Franco Sorrentino’s romantic relationship with Devorah Kirschenbaum draws him inadvertently into white Leftist student political activism on the eve of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa. For the South African white student Leftist movement it becomes a time of revolutionary expectations which foreshadows the eventual overthrow of apartheid.
Black Soldier Fly Products: Generic Description and Analysis of the Production Process for Chitosan, Proteins and Lipid from Black Soldier Fly Larvae.
Price: Free! Words: 9,660. Language: English. Published: November 5, 2019 . Categories: Nonfiction » Engineering, trades, & technology » Industrial Technology
Chitosan is a high valued commodity which can be manufactured from the chitin in exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects.
The Man with No Needs
Price: Free! Words: 98,750. Language: English. Published: July 15, 2019 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
If we had to choose a patron divinity or daemon for Joe Magee then Hermes would be most qualified to fill this role. Hermes is the divine trickster, the god of boundaries, the god of the transgression of boundaries, the god or patron of merchants, traders, thieves, herdsmen, commerce, roads, trickery, sports, athletics and graves. Hermes moves freely between worlds of the divine and the mortal.
Hotazel: Journal Writings of a Lipstick Lesbian
Price: Free! Words: 423,540. Language: English. Published: December 13, 2018 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Notebooks written by an enigmatic lesbian anarchist intellectual, in that free-flowing engaging style which fills pages with all kinds of erudite and erotic commentary on a mind blowing diversity of topics representing her literary attempt to make sense of an infinite mass of undifferentiated facts regarding her life experiences and the history of the Universe, end up been published posthumously.
Farewell to Innocence: The Full Uncensored Saga of Hannah Zeeman
Price: Free! Words: 146,140. Language: English. Published: July 1, 2018 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
The life of Hannah Zeeman becomes entangled in multiple plots which unfold sinuously in a world where the boundaries between faith, reason, race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and sexuality start collapsing inexorably as the dawn of a new age sweeps away all ancient verities and customs. It is also an exotic story of revolution and love between women.
World of Shadows
Price: Free! Words: 24,810. Language: English. Published: December 2, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
In the dying days of apartheid a Communist detained by the security police finds herself in a world of shadows, smoke and mirrors, where truth and falsehood seemed to merge seamlessly. It was also a world in which men and women lied shamelessly, and betrayal became the reality of not only the counter insurgency game but also the ultimate inexorable destiny of the revolution.
Look Not upon Me
Price: Free! Words: 5,030. Language: English (South African dialect). Published: November 29, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
After six years of self-imposed exile as a teacher in Swaziland who is also a correspondence student studying Hebrew returns to South Africa shortly after the June 16th Soweto youth uprising in 1976. She has returned to complete the research for her MA degree which involves a philological analysis of the original Hebrew version of the Song of Songs. Her return is marred by experiences of racism
Discovering Paradise
Price: Free! Words: 13,440. Language: English. Published: November 28, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
At twelve I was personally experiencing an intimate state of bodily strangeness. My sense of otherness increased my moodiness. My dark moods and adolescent sullenness were due to the fact that I was in the throes of a dramatic psychosexual metamorphosis orchestrated by a surging flood of oestrogen and progesterone. The drama of glands and ganglia within my body was invisible to me and the world.
Metamorphosis
Price: Free! Words: 30,480. Language: English. Published: October 7, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
How could a feminine conscious self-awareness arise from the material constituents out of which the Universe was composed? Feminization was to become fabulous, to be feminine was to be ‘fantastical’. To be fantastical was to be whimsical, fanciful, sublime and above all, magnificent in a freshly metamorphosed body.
The Wind Blows and the River Flows
Price: Free! Words: 30,280. Language: English. Published: October 7, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
In this novella Joab Badenhorst as a white South African male finds himself literally thrown into the cauldron of war, fighting on the wrong side of history, first in the counter-insurgency bush war on the Namibian-Angolan border and then in the Angolan civil war. Unable to extricate himself he experiences at first hand the existential futility of his life in a Universe ruled by contingency.
The Black Maid from Ikageng. An African Novella.
Price: Free! Words: 35,070. Language: English. Published: October 4, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
A young black woman desperately seeking work is forced by economic circumstances to accept the position as a domestic servant in the employment of two postgraduate students studying at the University of Potchefstroom who live in a cottage hidden among acacia trees at the edge of town. A relationship develops between the maid and one of the students which plunges them into a life changing crisis.
Comrade Hannah
Price: Free! Words: 5,910. Language: English. Published: September 3, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
A lipstick lesbian who is a radical feminist joins the communist party not knowing that her every move is under constant surveillance, but she is saved from arrest by the security police by the intervention of the most unlikely guardian angel.
The Secret Agent
Price: Free! Words: 7,720. Language: English. Published: August 20, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
It was difficult to fathom Sheldon. He did come across as a hard line Leftist or Marxist. This was confusing for me and for the others. Was he phony or was he genuine. I could honestly not tell at the time.
The Fresh Fragrance of Jasmine
Price: Free! Words: 68,310. Language: English. Published: August 19, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Her weeping over her loss of faith in the early hours of the morning, in the pitch darkness before dawn, woke me up from a deep slumber. I had fallen asleep after we had made love. All this time she had been lying awake in anguish. In desperation she asked me like a child: ‘What must I do now if there is no God?’
The Model from Senegal
Price: Free! Words: 24,420. Language: English. Published: August 12, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Erotica » Lesbian Erotica, Fiction » Romance » Erotic
Basking in the Mediterranean sun, visiting art museums in Italy, and walking the streets of Paris a young student from Africa embarks on a journey of love and erotic adventure.
Nonhlanhla’s Silhouette
Price: Free! Words: 3,180. Language: English. Published: August 12, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Under the veil of night multiracial love in apartheid South Africa with all its painfulness exists as a transient shadow for two women before whithering away in the dawn of a new day.
The Rabbi's Wife
Price: Free! Words: 14,360. Language: English. Published: August 8, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
A strange and unlikely romance begins on a night-train journey, the romance fraught with deception, contradictions and comedy borders on farce. The love between the two individuals requires them to negotiate impossible obstacles, and all the time the Rabbi remains completely oblivious of his beautiful wife's secret love life.
The Barracuda Night Club Mystery
Price: Free! Words: 67,390. Language: English. Published: July 21, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
This novel is the third book in the Barracuda Night Club trilogy. Aaron and Geraldine leave apartheid South Africa for Swaziland where they start their careers as teachers at a remote mission station in a valley at the foot of the great Lebombo mountains. They go on an erotic honeymoon journey into Mozambique. This is the first stage in the unravelling of the mystery of the Barracuda Night Club
Who Was Oreithyia?
Price: Free! Words: 84,470. Language: English. Published: July 20, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
This novel is the second book in The Barracuda Night Club trilogy. The entanglement of the lives of Aaron and Geraldine grows more complex. progressing inexorably to the inevitable crisis which sets them onto the journey to the Barracuda Night Club.
The Mouse Trap
Price: Free! Words: 22,720. Language: English (South African dialect). Published: January 5, 2017 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
This novella is meant to shock you and thereby save you from the monotony, boredom and death that is the fate of a mundane existence which we all suffer like some innocuous illness of the soul and mind. The story which emerges from a discussion between two old friends revolves around the memories they share of three people, Charles, Vera and Paula, who touched their lives in an unspeakable manner.
Send Him My Love
Price: Free! Words: 18,510. Language: English. Published: December 20, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Romance
On a chance meeting on a flight to Paris a professor of philosophy tells a young fashion model an intriguing story of love triangles, infidelities, betrayal, forgiveness which revolve around a desirable young woman who could have been a character out of a Luis Bunuel movie as the one called 'That obscure object of desire'.
Three Days in Phoenix
Price: Free! Words: 10,880. Language: English. Published: November 5, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Romance » Fantasy
After Dr Trevor Guzmán had packed his meagre belongings into the boot of his dark blue Ford Capri he bid farewell to Potchefstroom. On the road to Johannesburg he stopped and picked up a hitchhiker. Little did he know that his life was going to change in the most unimaginable way.
Hotazel: Queer Memoirs of a Lipstick Lesbian
Price: Free! Words: 318,490. Language: English (South African dialect). Published: October 31, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Hotazel shares the sense of bodily confinement with works such as Descartes’ ‘Meditations’, Xavier De Maistre’s ‘A Journey around my Room’, Beckett’s Molloy and Malone, Bunyan’s ‘ Pilgrim’s Progress’, and Proust’s ‘Narrator’. Forced to endure the mind numbing paucity of events which usually interrupt and fill the normality of our daily lives, Hannah clings onto her sanity by exploring her memory
Devorah's Prayer
Price: Free! Words: 68,380. Language: English (South African dialect). Published: September 30, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Romance » Action/adventure
Franco Sorrentino and Devorah Kirschenbaum become involved in a romantic relationship which inadvertently draws them ineluctably into radical political activism causing them to face complex and paradoxical moral choices in Apartheid South Africa during the time of the Angolan Civil War.
Waterlandsridge
Price: Free! Words: 22,960. Language: English. Published: August 13, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
(4.00 from 1 review)
Waterlandsridge is the story of an African farm in the early 1960s told by two teenagers, a brother and a sister. Through what they see, experience and think we acquire an intimate insight into their rural universe with all its characteristic rhythms of life and death, hope and grief.
The Soccer Player
Price: Free! Words: 11,450. Language: English. Published: August 11, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Sports
This is a short story dealing with the Sisyphean struggles associated with the passionate commitment to one's life project which in a sense is linked to the attainment of personal authenticity, it is about living a life centred around 'doing' rather than 'having'. It deals with the personal emotional costs of following one's dreams.
The Fable of the Elephant
Price: Free! Words: 6,030. Language: English. Published: August 10, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary, Fiction » Alternative history
The fable of the elephant is filled with unexpected ironies, twists and turns, and it will take another thousand years to unlock all of its secrets.
The Tale of the Sakabula Bird
Price: Free! Words: 45,000. Language: English. Published: June 20, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Romance » Historical » General
During the tumultuous and violent People’s War of the 1980s which resulted in the overthrow of apartheid the secret police detained thousands of activists many of whom ‘were disappeared’ after been tortured to death. Wanetta an activist was also caught up in the secret police dragnet and detained at a remote secret detention centre where many activists had been tortured and murdered.
The Girl from Germiston
Price: Free! Words: 98,860. Language: English. Published: June 5, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Romance » Action/adventure
After a chance meeting with the incurably fickle but exquisitely beautiful Helena Lathbury, Julian Bogart finds himself on a roller-coaster journey which takes him from the orphan city of Germiston to the streets of Paris. While in the Louvre after being warned by a stranger they discover that they have been mistaken for terrorists and their abduction by South African secret agents was imminent.
Rebekah of Lake Sibaya
Price: Free! Words: 70,780. Language: English. Published: February 3, 2016 . Categories: Fiction » Romance » Action/adventure
Zebedee undergoes a life transforming journey while doing his national military service in the South African Defence force at Lake Sibaya in the company of two eccentric comrades. Through his two friends he is exposed to a whole new way of experiencing and perceiving the world. He also experiences enigmatic and paradoxical encounters with different women, including the mysterious Rebekah
Segomotso and the Dressmaker
Price: Free! Words: 141,950. Language: English. Published: November 1, 2015 . Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary, Fiction » Cultural & ethnic themes » Cultural interest, general
In the midst of apartheid repression and liberation wars Joab's life as a bisexual dressing-making transvestite changes forever after he employs a young beautiful black woman called Segomotso as his house keeper. They are caught contravening the racially based immorality act which forbids relationships between different races in South Africa.
The Girl from Reiger Park.
Price: Free! Words: 116,310. Language: English. Published: May 5, 2015 . Categories: Fiction » Romance » Action/adventure
(4.00 from 2 reviews)
This novel is the first book in the Barracuda Night Club trilogy. During the brutal and dark days of apartheid in the 1960s Aaron Finnegan a white teenager from a middle class Boksburg family had a chance encounter with Geraldine McNamara, a black teenager, who happened to be standing outside a store in the Indian shanty town called Kalamazoo. That was the day when their romantic adventure began.