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PROFILES T-Z
Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian author. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was published in 2007 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year. His second novel, The Garden of Evening Mist, will be published later this year.
Tim Butcher was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph from 1990 to 2009 serving a chief war correspondent, Africa bureau chief and Middle East correspondent. His first book Blood River was a bestseller, a Richard & Judy Book Club selection and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and his most recent book Chasing the Devil – the Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit pursues a trail blazed through Sierra Leone and Liberia by Graham Greene in 1935, and immortalised in the travel classic Journey Without Maps. Tim is currently based in Cape Town with his family.
Tim Couzens was born in Durban and educated at Durban High School. He has degrees from Rhodes, Oxford and Wits (where he was a lecturer and researcher for over 30 years). He has published three full biographies, the latest of which was Murder at Morija, and has written numerous travel articles for the Lifestyle section of the Sunday Times. He has also published Battles of South Africa and, with Jenny Hobbs, Pees and Queues: The Complete Loo Companion. More recently he has participated in Mandela: The Authorised Portrait, co-authored A Simple Freedom with Ahmed Kathrada, and was consulting editor to Mandela’s Conversations with Myself.
Tom Eaton is a steam-powered robot from 1756, sent back in time by scientists at the Ingeborg Blatz Harpsichord Factory in Vienna to find and assassinate the inventor of the pianoforte. However, the time-launch malfunctioned when the whey-and-beeswax palpitator passed through a nearby candelabra and set the flaxen fluxometer-flue on fire and he was sent to modern-day Cape Town instead. His mission software destroyed by contact with a particularly virulent Sterri Stumpi, Eaton now believes he can make a living from writing, a delusion that causes him to wander in moonlight, weeping softly to himself.
Australian writer Tony Park was born in 1964. He fell in love with South Africa on a short trip in 1995 and he and his wife now divide their time between their home in Sydney and a tent in the Kruger Park. He is a qualified military parachutist and a major in the Australian Army Reserve. He has worked in journalism and PR, including 6 months in Afghanistan in 2002 as PR officer for the Australian ground forces there.
Tony Weaver graduated from UCT and started as a political journalist in 1981, working for the Rand Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Cape Times, including two years as Namibian bureau chief for all three newspapers. By the mid 1980s he was covering southern Africa for a number of overseas radio and TV networks. At the end of 1992 he and his wife, documentary filmmaker Liz Fish, embarked on a two-year journey through Africa in their Land Rover, living in a tent, and he spent the next 15 years writing about and photographing the continent for a wide range of local and international publications. He is co-author of the book Once We Were Hunters – A Journey With Africa’s Indigenous People, and a contributing author to a number of books. He currently works as Assistant Editor: Opinion at the Cape Times, writing the weekly Man Friday column.
Tracey Farren lives on the Cape Peninsula with her partner, dogs and three children of a range of ages. She has a psychology honours degree from UCT and started out as a freelance journalist, covering issues like child justice, prostitution and prison conditions. Her first novel, Whiplash (2008) came out of investigative research into the realm of sex work in S.A. Whiplash won a White Ribbon award from Women Demand Dignity in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction prize. Tracey adapted the novel to a feature-length film in 2010. The script was recently selected by the National Film and Video Foundation to show case at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival. Her second novel will be published this year, also by Modjaji Books.
Tymon Smith is Books Editor of the Sunday Times.
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is a Professor of History at UWC. She is the author/editor of Cane Fields to Freedom: a Chronicle of Indian South African Life (2000); Sita: The Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (2003) and Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (2004). The latter book about her grandfather won the Via Afrika award for best non-fiction. She has written widely on the history of Indian South Africans, Gandhi’s work in South Africa, and forced removals and land restitution in Cape Town.
Wilmot James is a former academic turned politician. He entered politics to make a contribution to creating a better future for our children in this great land of ours. He has not stopped being an academic though: last year he published likely the first (for a South African) 'public understanding of science' book titled Nature's Gifts: Why we are the way we are. And he is very lucky: he has two fabulous daughters Gabriele and Isabella and is married to the delightful Delecia Forbes. And then, of course, there is a weekly hike up and down Table Mountain to keep him sane! What else is there to life?
Zakes Mda is a South African writer, painter, composer and film maker. He commutes between South Africa and the United States, working as a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, a dramaturge at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and a director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He has been the recipient of the M-Net Book Prize for Ways of Dying, as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Sunday Times Fiction Award for The Heart of Redness.
Zubeida Jaffer is an award-winning South African journalist and author. She started her career at the Cape Times in 1980 and also spent a short stint at the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg. Her work has earned her numerous local and international awards. These include the Muslim Views Achiever Award as well as the Honor Medal for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri in the USA. She is also the first woman in Africa to have won the coveted foreign journalist award from the National Association of Black Journalists in the USA. Her memoir, Our Generation, eloquently tells the story of her emotional journey through the years of South Africa’s turbulence into a new democracy. Her second book, Love in the Time of Treason has been described as a ‘tour de force’.
