Tyrone August is a journalist and editor who graduated from the University of KwaZulu- Natal and gained an MA with distinction from the University of London. He has worked on The Star, City Press, New Nation, Sowetan and Tribute magazine and been the Editor of Learn & Teach, Leadership and the Cape Times. He has also been closely involved with the Council of Unions of SA, the Media Workers’ Association of SA, the Association of Democratic Journalists, the Black Editors’ Forum, the SA National Editors’ Forum, the Freedom of Expression Institute and both the Vita Theatre Awards and the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Awards.

Véronique Tadjo is a novelist, poet and painter. She also writes and illustrates children’s books. Born in Paris, of an Ivorian father and a French mother, she was brought up in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). She has a doctorate in African American literature and civilization from the Sorbonne and was a Fulbright scholar at Howard University in Washington. She has taught at the University of Abidjan, conducted writing workshops in many countries, been a member of the jury for literary prizes and is now Head of French Studies at Wits. Her novel Reine Pokou (Queen Pokou) was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire in 2005.

Victor Dlamini has worked as a journalist in both print and broadcasting, and is now a partner of Dlamini Weil Communications. He is widely regarded as an industry leader in the field of corporate communications, having successfully handled some of the most demanding public relations assignments in the country, and is highly sought after as an adviser to leaders of S African organisations on their communications strategies.

Wessel Ebersohn remembers writing his first novel when he was eight but the wait to see himself in print was a long one.  29 years laterGollancz published A Lonely Place to Die, followed by a string of novels in the late 1970s and early 1980s reflecting the South African reality of the time. Two of them, Store up the Anger and Divide the Night were banned by the apartheid government. In the mid 1980s Wessel became disillusioned with aspects of the liberation struggle and the Ebersohn family fled Johannesburg to live in the Knysna Forest for six years, when only two novels were published, Klara’s Visitors and Closed Circle . A break in fiction writing of almost 20 years was the result of the family starting Succeed, an entrepreneurship magazine. Now he has returned to fiction with The October Killings which will be followed in July 2010 by Those Who Love Night.

Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) is South Africa’s best-known and most controversial cartoonist.