Maneo Refiloe Mohale is a queer South African Black feminist writer, editor, and poet. They have written for various local and international publications including Jalada, Prufrock, The Beautiful Project, The Mail & Guardian and spectrum.za. [1] Their debut collection of poetry, Everything is a deathly flower, was published in September 2019 with uHlanga Press. [2] In 2020, Mohale was shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, making them the youngest finalist of that year. [1] [3]
Maneo Mohale was born in 1992 in Benoni, South Africa. They hold a Bachelor of Arts degree (Honours) in History and International Relations from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. [4]
After living in Canada for 5 years, they now live in Johannesburg working as a writer and editor. [5]
Mohale's work engages with the topics of race, media, queerness, survivorship, language and history. [4] Their undergraduate thesis at the University of British Columbia was titled A Dance in the Rain: Race, Resistance and Media in Apartheid South Africa. [6] In their time in university, Mohale was introduced to arts journalism when they co-founded an online student journalism platform called The Talon in 2014. [7] [8]
Mongane Wally Serote is a South African poet and writer. He became involved in political resistance to the apartheid government by joining the African National Congress (ANC) and in 1969 was arrested and detained for several months without trial. He subsequently spent years in exile, working in Botswana, and later London, England, for the ANC in their Arts and Culture Department, before eventually returning to South Africa in 1990. He was inaugurated as South Africa's National Poet Laureate in 2018.
Ingrid Jonker was a South African poet and one of the founders of modern Afrikaans literature. Her poems have been widely translated into other languages.
Marlene van Niekerk is a South African poet, writer, and academic. She is best known for her novels, the satirical tragicomedy Triomf (1994) and the Hertzog-winning Agaat (2004), which explore themes including the family, the change in power dynamics occasioned by the end of Apartheid, and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Van Niekerk is also an award-winning poet. She writes in her native tongue, Afrikaans, and teaches at Stellenbosch University.
Ivan Vladislavić is a South African author, editor and professor. Vladislavić's style has been described as postmodern, innovative, humorous and unpredictable. Despite receiving critical acclaim, his work is not well known outside his home country.
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Lydia Frances Polgreen is an American journalist. She was editorial director of NYT Global at The New York Times, and the West Africa bureau chief for the same publication, based in Dakar, Senegal, from 2005 to 2009. She also reported from India. She spent much of her early career in Johannesburg, South Africa where she was The New York Times South African Bureau Chief as well. She was editor-in-chief of HuffPost from 2016 to 2020, after which she spent about one year between 2021 and 2022 as the head of content for Gimlet Media. In 2022, after leaving Gimlet, she returned to The New York Times as an opinion columnist.
Dele Olojede is a Nigerian journalist and former foreign editor for Newsday. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. He serves on the board of EARTH University, in Costa Rica, and of The Markup, the New York-based investigative journalism organization focused on the impact of large tech platforms and their potential for human manipulation. He is the founder and host of Africa In the World, a hearts and minds festival held annually in Stellenbosch, in the Cape winelands of South Africa. He was a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
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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.
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For the South African triathlete, see Megan Hall.
The Ingrid Jonker Prize is a literary prize for the best debut work of Afrikaans or English poetry. It was instituted in honour of Ingrid Jonker after her death in 1965.
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Douglas Reid Skinner is a South African writer, editor, translator and poet. He was born in 1949 in Upington, in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.
Koleka Putuma is a South African queer poet and theatre-maker. She was nominated one of Okay Africa's most influential women in 2019.
Karin Schimke is a South African writer. She has won awards for her poetry and literary translations. She works as a writer and editor.
Sydney Clouts (1926–1982) was a South African poet. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and emigrated to London in the early 1960s. His book One Life gained its own volume in the New Coin Poetry Magazine in 1966. This debut poetry collection One Life won him the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 1966, for the best debut of Afrikaans or English poetry. It also won him the Olive Schreiner Prize for new and emergent talent of English Literature.
Mike Nicol is a South African writer and journalist.
Colin Style was a British-Zimbabwean poet and writer. He was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for best published collection in English in Southern Africa, 1977 with Baobab Street (1977).