BIOGRAPHY

Born and bred in rural towns in the Karoo and Northern Cape, I often return to this landscape for my books.

I attended University of Pretoria from 1976 to 1980 and started working as translator before I joined a small Pretoria based newspaper, Oggendblad. 

• Spent the rest of career as political journalist, working on several newspapers and magazines in SA – Die Vaderland, Insig, De Kat, Star newspaper, Rapport, Leadership magazine and covered most of the struggle wars raging in the black townships around Johannesburg.
• When Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, I was political correspondent for a Sunday paper, Rapport, which gave me a ring side seat at the birth of a new democracy.
• After the watershed elections of 1994, which saw Mandela become South Africa’s first democratically elected president, I started working freelance from my home in Stellenbosch near Cape Town. During this time I worked for cultural magazines like Insig – both as writer and at times as copy editor and assistant editor.