Margie Orford is New President of PEN South Africa

Margie Orford, the noted crime novelist and award-winning journalist, has been elected President of PEN South Africa by the institution’s executive committee with effect from June 19. She succeeds Anthony (Tony) Fleischer, who was president for many years and died after a short illness on June 5 at his home in Cape Town.

London-born Margie Orford grew up in Namibia and South Africa. While at the University of Cape Town she was detained by the apartheid government’s police during the State of Emergency in 1985 and wrote her final examinations in prison. She travelled widely and studied under author J M Coetzee, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, worked in publishing in the newly independent Namibia and gravitated into training under the African Publishers’ Network. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and while in New York she worked on a ground-breaking archival retrieval project, Women Writing Africa: The Southern Volume.

She is renowned for her crime writing but has also produced children’s fiction and school text books. She has also directed films and lives in Cape Town.