Jenny Hobbs

Jenny Hobbs is a novelist and freelance journalist who lives in Franschhoek. She is the author of three novels, Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, The Sweet-Smelling Jasmine, The Telling of Angus Quain, a novel for teenagers, Video Dreams, four non-fiction books, and short stories published and broadcast locally and by the BBC. She reviewed books for many years and has written for and worked on TV book programmes, both as a presenter and interviewing authors. Jenny is the Franschhoek Literary Director of the Festival.

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Heidi Holland

Heidi Holland has been reporting from Africa for 30 years. As a freelance journalist, she has written extensively about the continent for international newspapers including the Guardian and the Sunday Times in London, and for television channels including the BBC and Nine Network, Australia. Her books include The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress, published in the week Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years' imprisonment in 1990, and a true crime investigation of racism and violence in South Africa, published in 2006, The Colour of Murder: One family's horror exposes a nation's anguish.

Christopher Hope

Christopher Hope’s novels include: Kruger’s Alp, awarded the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, and Serenity House (nominated for the Booker Prize). His most recent novel is My Mother’s Lovers (Atlantic Books 2006). His new collection of stories, The Garden of Bad Dreams, is published by Atlantic Books in 2008. Christopher is the Director of the Franschhoek Literary Festival.

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Rayda Jacobs

Rayda Jacobs’ first novel, Eyes of the Sky, was published in 1996 and awarded the Herman Charles Bosman prize for English Fiction. Both Eyes of the Sky and her second novel, The Slave Book, are set in the Cape at the beginning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively. Her third novel, Sachs Street, is again set in contemporary Cape Town, in the historic Bo-Kaap, with flashbacks to the fifties. Her fourth novel Confessions of a Gambler won the Sunday Times Literary Award for Fiction as well as the Herman Charles Bosman Award in 2004. The book was made into a film which will be released in 2008. Her most recent published books are Postcards from South Africa, The Mecca Diaries and My Father’s Orchid. Jacobs was born in Diep River, Cape Town, but lived in Canada for 27 years. She returned to South Africa in the early nineties.

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Photo © Christine Fourie

Mhlobo Jadezweni

Mhlobo Jadezweni was born in Dutywa, kwaGcaleka (Eastern Cape). He studied at the Universities of Fort Hare and Stellenbosch and has been attached to the Department of African Languages at Stellenbosch University since 1983. He is the author of uTshepo Mde/Tall Enough, published in 2006, which won the inaugural Exclusive Books IBBY SA Children’s Book Award in 2007.

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Jitsvinger

Profile coming soon...

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Shaun Johnson

Shaun Johnson is the founding Chief Executive of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation. He was educated at Hyde Park High School in Johannesburg, Rhodes University, and at the University of Oxford. In 1994 he published Strange Days Indeed (Bantam Press), which won the South African Council on English Education’s Golden Ink Award. In 2006 Penguin Books published his first novel, The Native Commissioner. In 2007 the book won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in Africa, the M Net Literary Award, and the Nielsen Booksellers’ Choice Award.

For more information, visit, www.shaunjohnson.co.za

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