Margie Orford

Crime novelist, who is already an award winning journalist and film director, and author of children's fiction, non-fiction and school text books. Born in London, she grew up in Namibia and South Africa.

While at the University of Cape Town she wrote for Varsity and was detained during the State of Emergency in 1985. She wrote her final exams in prison. After traveling widely, she studied under J M Coetzee, and worked in publishing in the newly-independent Namibia, where she became involved in training through the African Publishers Network.

In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and while in New York she worked on a groundbreaking archival retrieval project, WOMEN WRITING AFRICA: The Southern Volume.  Her latest non-fiction project Fabulously 40 and Beyond: Women Coming Into their Own (Spearhead/NAB, 2006).  She lives in Cape Town.