This year’s Time of the Writer festival - under the theme “The Writer: Witness, Canary in the Mine or Testifier” - will host a variety of significant people making a difference in the literature space.
The festival, held virtually, allows South African, African and international writers to gather for a thought-provoking week of literary dialogue, exchange of ideas and stimulating discussions.
Time of the Writer features a diverse gathering of leading novelists, social commentators, activists, playwrights and short-story writers.
Here is out top 5 list of change-makers to look out for at the festival.
Nic Haralambous
Nic Haralambous is on the ball with the current challenges in the economy everyone should be thinking about, a side hustle.
He is also an accomplished start-up entrepreneur, global keynote speaker and critically acclaimed author.
He has sold three businesses in the past decade and has a lifetime of start-up lessons learned through failure and success over an intense and exciting twenty-year career as an entrepreneur.
His work focuses on helping people build incredible lives and businesses. Haralambous taught himself to code at age 11, built his first website at 12 and started his first business at 16.
His speaking career spans more than a decade and includes speaking events across the world, including SXSW in Austin, Texas; the Rutberg Conference in London; events for Liberty, Sasfin, Standard Bank, Vodacom, Old Mutual, Nedbank and many other global organisations.
Fred Khumalo
He is this year’s featured writer.
Khumalo is a novelist and short-story writer from Joburg.
The author of 12 books, his latest work is “Heart of a Strong Woman”, the best-selling autobiography of Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema, the co-creator of the hit musical “Sarafina!”
His famous novel “Dancing the Death Drill”, based upon the SS Mendi’s sinking during the First World War, won the 2019 Humanities and Social Sciences Award.
“Dancing the Death Drill” will be released in the German language at the end of 2021, by Interkontinental, in Berlin.
Khumalo has been shortlisted twice for the Commonwealth Short Story prize and once for the Short Story Day Africa award.
He has also been shortlisted three times for the Miles Morland Scholarship for Writers.
He has suffered for his art: in October 2019 he walked 460 kilometres in 10 days (from Johannesburg to Ladysmith), to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the march he has immortalised in his novel “The Longest March”.
Zukiswa Warner
Warner is this year’s keynote speaker at the festival. She is a writer, editor, publisher and curator born in Zambia, but considers the whole African continent her home.
Her debut novel, “The Madams” (2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 K.Sello Duiker Award.
Her third novel “Men of the South” (2010) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book 2011, and the Herman Charles Bosman Award.
As an editor and curator, she counts among her works the first African Young Adult anthology “Water Birds on the Lakeshore” (2019), which was published in English, French and Kiswahili and distributed in over 20 African countries. She is also founder and curator of the first pandemic virtual literary festival “Afrolit Sans Frontières”.
In 2020, she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Warner the first African woman to win the award.
She was also selected as Brittle Paper's African Literary Person of the Year and is on New African's 100 Most Influential Africans for 2020.
Zakes Mda
Zakes Mda is a veteran writer, painter, film-maker, and music composer. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in literature by the University of Cape Town, Wits University and the University of the Free State.
He has published 25 books, eleven of which are novels and the rest collections of plays, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theatre-for-development.
His paintings have been exhibited in South Africa, Lesotho and the USA, and are in collections in those countries and in Spain and Sweden.
His writings have been translated into 22 languages, including Estonian, Catalan, Korean, Serbian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish, Norwegian and Italian.
They have won many awards in South Africa, the USA and Italy, including the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the M-Net Prize, Sanlam Prizes, The Pringle Award, the Sunday Times Literary Prize to name just a few.
He commutes between the USA, where he teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, and is Professor Emeritus at Ohio University, and South Africa, where he is a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape and a director of NeoZane, an animation film production company.
Zubeida Jaffer
Award-wining South African journalist and author, Zubeida Jaffer started her career at the Cape Times in 1980 and also had a short stint at the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg in the same year.
Last year, 2020, marked her 40th year in journalism.
Her work has earned her numerous local and international awards.
These include the Muslim Views Achiever Award as well as the Honour Medal for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri 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’ and is published internationally under the title, “On Trial with Mandela”.
Some of her writings and research documents can be found at her website, www.zubeidajaffer.co.za.