Anthony Sampson

Mandela

The 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award went to Anthony Sampson for Mandela and Katherine Newman for No Shame in My Game.

Sampson’s Mandela, the only authorized biography of the leader who ended Apartheid, follows Nelson Mandela from his boyhood in remote villages to his transformation into a global icon of strength, moral courage and racial reconciliation. Sampson, who had known Mandela since 1951, was given Mandela's complete cooperation, including access to twenty-seven years' worth of unpublished correspondence from prison and many other private documents, and interviewed virtually every significant living figure associated with the South African leader. Anthony Sampson was a British writer and journalist who spent years in South Africa as editor of Drum magazine. He died in 2004.