Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes is a writer, TV scriptwriter and recovering journalist (although she occasionally falls off the wagon). She has an MA in Creative Writing, but she got her real education in ten years of freelance journalism, learning really useful skills like how to pole-dance and make traditional sorghum beer. For the sake of a story, she's jumped out of planes and into shark-infested waters and got to hang out with teen vampires, township vigilantes, AIDS activists and homeless sex workers among other interesting folk. When she's not tutoring her baby daughter (aka the queen of eeeeeeevil) in practical ways to take over the world, she also writes books, short stories, magazine articles and TV scripts various. She's twice been longlisted for the Sunday Times book prize, in 2006 for the Alan Paton Award for best non-fiction for Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa's Past and in 2009 in the fiction category for Moxyland. She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter.