I'm a writer, author and visual storyteller based in Cape Town, South Africa. After graduating from a psychology degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2009, I shifted my professional focus to portrait and documentary photography, creating safe spaces for South African women to share their everyday struggles and stories. Boosted by the voices of  the women I photographed, I was able to explore my own relationship to issues of identity, gender based violence and the impact of infertility on a woman’s sense of self.

 

In 2018 I invited victims of GBV to be photographed as a way of sharing their stories of abuse, and ten women stepped forward. I turned the lessons I learnt from that portrait series into a 2019 TEDx talk, which centred on survivor shame and its implications for the expression of vulnerability. I was accepted into UCT’s Creative Writing MA program in 2020 and graduated in 2022 with a distinction. My debut novel Glass Tower was published in 2023 - it won that year's Island Prize for debut fiction from Africa and has been long listed for the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Fiction Award. Currently I'm working towards my masters in psychological research at UCT while writing my second novel.