Guest, Sessional and Affiliated Teachers and Lecturers

Masande Ngcali Ntshanga is a South African novelist, short story writer, poet, editor and publisher. He is the author of two novels: The Reactive (2014), which won a Betty Trask Award in 2018, and Triangulum (2019), which was nominated for a Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African. In 2020, Ntshanga released his third book, Native Life in the Third Millennium (2020), a collection of poetry and prose from his experimental press, Model See Media, which was also well received, with critics praising it for its themes and use of language. Ntshanga teaches Writing Immersion in the Honours programme.

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is the author of The Blinded City: Ten Years in Inner-City Johannesburg. (Picador Africa, 2023), a narrative non-fiction work about life in unlawful occupations, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Award. A senior lecturer in Anthropology at Wits, he works at the intersections of narrative and ethnography, and on themes of urban studies and climate change. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Wits University, and a masters and doctorate in Development Studies from the University of Oxford. He is a contributing co-editor of several collections including the Mail & Guardian e-book of long-form narrative Writing Invisibility: Conversations on the Hidden City (2013), Routes and Rites to the City: Mobility, Diversity and Religious Space in Johannesburg (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes (Duke University Press, 2020). He is published widely in international and South African journals and media. He is presently revising a novel, which draws on traditions of post-colonial surrealism, and working on a collection of crônicas, short essays, on transatlantic cultural responses to catastrophe.

Lindelwa Dalamba

Lindelwa Dalamba currently works at the Wits School of Arts, Department of Music, University of the Witwatersrand. She is an historian of South African jazz, focusing on its evolution in the country and in exile in Britain during apartheid. Her current projects are on the musician, writer, journalist and broadcaster Todd Matshikiza: 'Beyond King Kong: Literary, Historical and Musicological Perspectives on Todd Matshikiza', funded by the National Research Foundation (Thuthuka), Grant Number 106960 and on the hard bop South African ensemble, The Blue Notes, funded by the Mellon Staff Development Grant, Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand.

Fouad Asfour

Fouad Asfour is a writer and researcher working in collaborative frameworks of publications, exhibitions, performance and research projects. He has contributed to numerous contemporary art and research projects and has published widely, holds an MA in Linguistics from Vienna University, Austria, and an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa. He founded Pole Pole Press publishing project in 2011 and is part of the art research projects Art on our Mind and African Feminisms Conferences (Afems). In 2008, he received the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory working grant.

TJ Dema

Tjawangwa Dema / TJ Dema is a Botswana-based poet, arts administrator and teaching artist.. Her first full-length book The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and was a Brittle Paper Top 15 Debut Book of 2019. Her collection an/other pastoral (No Bindings, 2022) was a Finalist for the 2022 Luschei Prize and the 2022 African Studies Association Aidoo-Snyder Book Award, long listed for the 2022 UK Poetry Book Awards and named a 100 Notable African Book by Brittle Paper. Formerly an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol, Honorary Fellow of The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program as well as Chairperson of the Writers’ Association of Botswana, in 2023 Tjawangwa was invited to address the United Nations Habitat Assembly. Tjawangwa serves on the ‘On African Poetry’ Editorial Committee, the Lyra Poetry Festival steering committee as well as the Bristol Poetry Institute Partnerships Board.

Ari Sitas

Ari Sitas is a distinguished sociologist, novelist, dramatist, a founder member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, and a cultural activist celebrated for his work in popular and worker theatre. He is the former Head of Department and an Emeritus Professor in Sociology at UCT. As a poet he has written eight books, and collaborated with many visual artists and musicians. His poems are passionate, politically undaunted and wide-ranging, expressed with the exploratory instinct of a jazz improviser.

David Medalie

David Medalie is an award-winning writer and has many years' experience of teaching Creative Writing. He is a short story writer, novelist and anthologist. His publications include two collections of short stories, The Shooting of the Christmas Cows (1990) (David Philip), The Mistress's Dog (2010) (Picador Africa/ Pan Macmillan) and a novel, The Shadow Follows (2006) (Picador Africa/ Pan Macmillan). He edited two anthologies of South African short stories, Encounters (1998) and Recognition (2017), both published by Wits University Press.

Prof. Medalie's writing has won or been short-listed for a number of literary awards, including the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award, the CNA Debut Award, and the Thomas Pringle Award

Jolyn Phillips

Jolyn Phillips was born and bred in Blompark, Gansbaai. She completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing under Professor Meg Vandermerwe. She is an award-winning author for her debut collection of short stories, Tjieng Tjang Tjerries and other stories which won the NIHSS Prize for Best Fiction. She also published a collection of Afrikaans poetry titled Radbraak that won the UJ Prize for Best Debut in 2017, and Bientang: ’n !nau gedig which won the Eugene Marais Prize in 2021. She is also known as a stage performer and singer/songwriter. As a singer/songwriter she has a self-titled album available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music. In 2022 she received the Working Group Grant from the NIHSS which funded her collection Bientang: ’n !nau gedig to be adapted for stage and shown at major festivals such as the Klein Karoo Kunstefees (KKNK), the Suidoosterfees and the US Toyota Woordfees in 2022. She recently handed in her PhD in English literature titled ‘Bientang’s Cave: A Trans-disciplinary Study of Marginality in the Epic in Afrikaans’. She is currently working as a freelance stage performer and lecturer.

Guest, Sessional and Affiliated Teachers and Lecturers

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