Jo-Anne Richards | |
|---|---|
| Born | Port Elizabeth, South Africa |
| Occupation | Author, journalist |
| Nationality | South African |
| Alma mater | Rhodes University |
| Years active | 1996– |
| Notable works | The Innocence of Roast Chicken, Touching The Lighthouse, Sad At The Edges, My Brother's Book, The Imagined Child |
| Website | |
| joannerichards | |
Jo-Anne Richards is a South African journalist and author. [1]
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] She was National Chair of the South Africa Turner's Syndrome Support Group.
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.
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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.
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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.
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."
CarolAnn "C. A." Davids is a South African writer and editor who is best known for her novels The Blacks of Cape Town, (2013), How To Be A Revolutionary, (2022) and her short stories.
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
Jani Confidential is a memoir by the late South African columnist Jani Allan, once the most famous media figure in the country as a columnist for the country's mass-circulation Sunday Times. Allan charts her rise in South African journalism against the backdrop of excess and decadence of the country's white elites. Allan's life unravels when an interview with the late Eugene Terre'Blanche threatens to derail her glittering career. Her memoir became a critical success, lauded by publications such as the Daily Maverick, Mail & Guardian and Noseweek. Commercially Jani Confidential also performed well, becoming a Sunday Times top five best-seller. The memoir was published by Jacana Media on 16 March 2015.
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.
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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.
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