Zukiswa Wanner is an award winning South African author, curator, editor, and publisher.
She is the author of the novels The Madams (Oshun, 2006); Behind Every Successful Man (Kwela, 2008), Men of the South (Kwela 2010) and London Cape Town Joburg (Kwela, 2014). She has also written two works of nonfiction, Maid in SA (Jacana, 2013) and Hardly Working (Black Letter Media, 2018). She authored four children’s books Jama Loves Bananas (Jacana, 2011), Refilwe (Jacana, 2013), The Seven Continents: Africa (Scholastic, 2019) and Black Pimpernel: Nelson Mandela on the Run (Pushkin Press, 2022).
Awards
She won the K Sello Duiker Award at the South African Literary Awards for her London Cape Town Joburg in 2015; she was shortlisted for the same award in 2007 for her debut novel The Madams. In 2020, she became the first African woman to be awarded the Goethe Medal, a German state award for her contribution to cultural exchange. She was selected among the pan-Africanist New African magazine’s 100 Most Influential Africans and cited by literary blog Brittle Paper as Literary Person of the Year 2020.
Editor
She has edited alongside Rohini Chowdhury, Behind The Shadows. Contemporary Stories from Africa and Asia (2012), on her own Water Birds on The Lake Shore (Ouida Books, 2019) also published in French and Kiswahili, and The Heart is A Bastard (2023) also published in Kiswahili as Moyo ni Mwanaharamu (edited by Elias Mutani).
She is the co-founder of the Paivapo Publishing house established in 2018. Its titles include the children’s anthology Story Story, Story Come edited by Maimouna Jallow, Mukoma wa Ngugi’s We, the Scarred (originally published by Ohio University Press as Mrs Shaw), Yara Nakahanda Monteiro’s Loose Ties and The Daughters of Nandi by Nokuthula Mazibuko Msimang. She has also taken the rights back for her novels which are under the same publisher.
Keen to ensure that as many children as possible get access to the beautiful stories in Story Story, Story Come, she has had the book translated into isiXhosa, Tshivenda and Kiswahili and has personally translated the book into Shona.
Wanner is the creator and curator of the arts initiative Artistic Encounters which has been running since 2017 and has had performances in Nairobi, Kenya, Johannesburg, South Africa and in June, Zurich, Switzerland.
In 2020, she founded the first pandemic literary festival Afrolit Sans Frontieres which morphed to Virtually Yours.
Keynote addresses
Ms. Wanner has delivered keynote addresses for The Time of The Writer Festival (2020), US’s African Students Association Black Women’s Caucus (2021) and East Africa Literary and Cultural Studies (2021).