Jo-Anne Richards

Last updated

Jo-Anne Richards
Born Port Elizabeth, South Africa
OccupationAuthor, journalist
NationalitySouth African
Education Collegiate Girls High School
Alma mater Rhodes University
Years active1996–
Notable worksThe Innocence of Roast Chicken, Touching The Lighthouse, Sad At The Edges, My Brother's Book, The Imagined Child
Website
joannerichards.com

Jo-Anne Richards is a South African journalist and author. [1]

Contents

Jo-Anne Richards in 1998 Jo-Anne Richards.jpg
Jo-Anne Richards in 1998

Biography

Jo-Anne Richards grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and was educated at Collegiate Girls' high school. Her first books that she read were The Boy Next Door and The Island of Adventure. [2] She graduated from Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1979, followed by an Honours degree in Journalism and Linguistics. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was a lecturer in journalism for 15 years.

Richards worked full-time for four South African newspapers – The Star , the Sunday Express, the Cape Times and Evening Post – reporting, sub-editing and news-editing. She has written features and supplements for numerous South African magazines and newspapers, including Fair Lady , Elle, Diversions, True Love, the Sunday Times Magazine, The Star and the Mail & Guardian .

Richards rose to prominence with her first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996), which became a bestseller in her native country and was short-listed for the M-Net Book Prize and nominated for the Impac International Dublin Literary Award. Richards wrote on concepts such as striving and slacking in a dead book proposal in the mid 1990s. [1]

She lives in Cape Town, where she teaches creative writing.

Richards was once married to poet Mark Swift. [3]

Novels

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antjie Krog</span> South African poet, philosopher, academic, and writer (born 1911)

Antjie Krog is a South African writer and academic, best known for her Afrikaans poetry, her reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her 1998 book Country of My Skull. In 2004, she joined the Arts faculty of the University of the Western Cape as Extraordinary Professor.

Anne Kellas is an Australian poet, reviewer and editor, who was born in South Africa and emigrated to Australia in 1986.

Leonie Joubert is a South African science writer and author specialising in climate and environmental collapse, energy policy, and why cities leave us hungry, heavy, and sick. More recently, her work delves into the realm of public mental health. She has spent the better part of 20 years exploring these topics through books, journalism, communication support to academics and civil society organisations, non-fiction creative writing, and podcasting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Mattera</span> South African poet and author (1935–2022)

Donato Francisco Mattera, better known as Don Mattera, was a South African poet and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jani Allan</span> South African journalist, columnist, writer and broadcaster (1952–2023)

Jani Allan was a South African journalist, columnist, writer, broadcaster, and media personality.

James Matthews, OIS was a South African poet, writer and publisher. During the Apartheid era his poetry was banned, and Matthews was detained by the government in 1976 and for 13 years was denied a passport.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernardine Evaristo</span> British author and academic (born 1959)

Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lauren Beukes</span> South African writer

Lauren Beukes is a South African novelist, short story writer, journalist and television scriptwriter.

The South African Book Fair is an international book fair in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is one of many similar events around the country. The fair started through a joint venture between the Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA) and the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was established in 2006 partially in response to the discontinuation of previous literary events, such as the Harare Book Fair and the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. The South African Book Fair features events including "authors’ readings, book launches, panel discussions and seminars".

Charlene Leonora Smith is a South African journalist, published author of 14 books, and is an authorized biographer of Nobel Peace Prize winner, and former South African President, Nelson Mandela. She is a communications and marketing consultant, and writing teacher, who lives and works in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Buckland</span> South African businessman (1974–2019)

Matthew Buckland was a South African Internet entrepreneur and businessman who founded and exited digital agency and publisher Creative Spark, acquired in 2015 by UK firm M&C Saatchi PLC, the holding group of M&C Saatchi. Buckland was also the founder of Burn Media, a suite of technology publishing brands which includes Memeburn, Ventureburn.com, Gearburn.com and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zukiswa Wanner</span> South African journalist, novelist and editor (born 1976)

Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Noni Jabavu</span> South African writer and journalist (1919–2008)

Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu was a South African writer and journalist, one of the first African women to pursue a successful literary career and the first black South African woman to publish books of autobiography. Educated in Britain from the age of 13, she became the first African woman to be the editor of a British literary magazine when in 1961 she took on the editorship of The New Strand, a revived version of The Strand Magazine, which had closed in 1950.

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. She has written: "I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side. After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification." She has also said: "Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up." As Tishani Doshi observes in the New Indian Express: "Much of her work is concerned with race, sexuality, class and gender within the South African context."

Emma Gilbey Keller is an author and journalist, based in New York City. She specializes in writing about women and women's issues. She has written two books: The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela and The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went From Career to Family and Back Again

Yewande Omotoso is a South African-based novelist, architect and designer, who was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria. She currently lives in Johannesburg. Her two published novels have earned her considerable attention, including winning the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, being shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the M-Net Literary Awards 2012, and the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature, and being longlisted for the 2017 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. She is the daughter of Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso, and the sister of filmmaker Akin Omotoso.

Jo Chandler is an Australian journalist, science writer and educator. Her journalism has covered a wide range of subject areas, including science, the environment, women's and children's issues, and included assignments in Africa, the Australian outback, Antarctica, Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism and Honorary Fellow Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karin Schimke</span> South African journalist and poet (born 1968)

Karin Schimke is a South African writer. She has won awards for her poetry and literary translations. She works as a writer and editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Ancer</span> South African journalist (born 1970)

Jonathan Ancer is a South African journalist, author, podcaster and media trainer. He wrote Uncovering Craig Williamson, which was on the longlist for the Alan Paton literary prize. Ancer wrote Betrayal: The Secret Lives of Apartheid Spies which was released in 2019.

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is a South African writer, editor, publisher and professor. She is the co-founder of the publisher Fourthwall Books and owns a bookstore called Edition. She acts as the primary editor for works on law and history of South Africa and the architecture and building process of its constitutional court structures, along with artistic book publications of the work of William Kentridge. She has also published her own novel called The Printmaker.

References

  1. 1 2 "Are you a striver, slacker or fantasist?". Financial Times. Retrieved 11 September 2018.
  2. 1 2 "Talking authors: Jo-Anne Richards". Mail & Guardian. 2 December 2009. Retrieved 11 September 2018.
  3. "Romantic poet who battled his demons". Independent Online. Retrieved 11 September 2018.