Derek Hook is a professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA and an extraordinary professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is one of the editors of the Palgrave Lacan Series and also of the four-volume Reading Lacan's Écrits (2018). Along with Sheldon George he edited the collection Lacan on Race (2021), and along with Leswin Laubscher and Miraj Desai he edited Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology (2022). He is also the editor of a first volume of Sobukwe letters, Lie on Your Wounds: The prison correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (2019).
Robert Sobukwe founded the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959 and was its president. He was imprisoned on Robben Island from 1960-1969, mostly in solitary confinement, and was considered such a threat by the government that its parliament enacted the 'Sobukwe clause', which authorised the arbitrary extension of his imprisonment. After his release in 1969, he lived in Kimberley with family under house arrest. He died in 1978 from lung cancer.
