Bongani Kona – President

Bongani Kona is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His writing has appeared in a variety of places including Chimurenga, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things and Other Stories, The Baffler and BBC Radio 4. Most recently, he edited Our Ghosts were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying (2021).

Nicky Falkof

Nicky Falkof is a writer and academic originally from Joburg, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Wits Media Studies department. She is the author of Ball and Chain: The Trouble with Modern Marriage (2007) and The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa (2015), and co-editor of Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (2020) and Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (forthcoming 2022). She has an interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, part of Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Masters in Critical Theory from Sussex University.

She is a Fellow of the ACLS African Humanities Programme, and has been a resident at the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre and a visiting scholar at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, Sussex University in the UK and UNAM in Mexico. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vice magazine, The Conversation, New Frame, The Mail & Guardian and the Daily Maverick, among other outlets.

Twitter: @barbrastrident

Website: nickyfalkof.com

Mandisa Haarhoff

Mandisa Haarhoff is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University. Her research and teaching focuses on African and Black Diasporic Literatures, Settler Colonial and Anticolonial Studies, Cartography, and Performance Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida as a Fulbright Scholar and holds a Masters in Theatre and Film from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. An actor and playwright, her works, Crush-hopper and Crawl (co-devised with Mlondi Zondi) both won Standard Bank Ovation awards. Her most recent work, Nesting Doll is co-written with vangile gantsho and directed by Wèma Ragophala. Haarhoff co-runs the Omnye Nomnye Performance festival with Jonathan Eburne. 

Kate Highman

Kate Highman is a lecturer in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town, and has done extensive research on the long (and at times fraught) history of PEN in South Africa, as part of a collaborative research project on Writers’ Organisations and Free Expression (www.writersandfreeexpression.com) that focuses particularly on PEN and its history in South Africa and India.

Her other research interests include the history and politics of ‘English’ as a university discipline in South Africa, and debates about plagiarism and cultural ownership. She has a PhD from the University of York and has worked or held fellowships at the University of the Western Cape, the University of Oxford and the University of Minnesota.

Mandla Langa

Mandla Langa comes from Durban. He went into exile in 1976 and has lived in Botswana, Mozambique, Angola, Hungary, Zambia and the United Kingdom. In 1980 Mandla won Drum Magazine’s Africa-wide story contest and in 1991 was awarded the Arts Council of Great Britain bursary for creative writing.

Mandla was the Cultural Representative of the African National Congress (ANC) in the UK and Western Europe. He has been a columnist for various newspapers and was the Convenor of the Task Group on Government Communications (COMTASK) in 1997, which restructured apartheid’s communication systems. From 1999 to 2005 he chaired the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA). In 2007, he received the National Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for his literary and journalistic contribution to democracy. In 1999 to 2000, he wrote the book for the musical, Milestones, which featured music by Hugh Masekela and Sibongile Khumalo.

His published works include Tenderness of Blood (1987), A Rainbow on a Paper Sky (1989), The Naked Song and Other Stories (1997), The Memory of Stones (2000), The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (2008), which won the 2009 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the African Region and The Texture of Shadows (2014). He co-authored Dare Not Linger with Nelson Mandela’s archives (2017) and was a fellow with STIAS (Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies). A recipient of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Fort Hare and Wits respectively, Mandla has a MA in Creative Writing from Wits. He sits on various boards such as Multichoice’s Phuthuma Nathi and Primedia and is a trustee of Media Monitoring Africa.

Jennifer Malec

Jennifer Malec is a writer and literary critic from Johannesburg. She is the founding editor of The Johannesburg Review of Books, an independent literary review that publishes book reviews, essays, poetry, interviews, photography and short fiction from South Africa, Africa and beyond. She is also the publisher of The Reading List, a news website for books and the publishing industry. In 2019 she won a South African Literary Award for Literary Journalism. She is the former editor of Books LIVE, where she won Arts Journalism Awards in 2015 (News: Gold) and 2016 (Features: Silver), and the 2016 African Blogger Award for Best in Arts and Culture. She has an MA from UCT and spent a number of years as a soccer journalist. 

Hedley Twidle

Hedley Twidle is an Associate Professor and Head of Department in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in twentieth-century, southern African and world literatures, as well as narrative non-fiction and the environmental humanities. His essay collection, Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, was published in 2017. Experiments with Truth, a study of life writing and the South African transition,appeared in 2019. A new essay collection, Show Me the Place, is forthcoming with Jonathan Ball in April 2024.