Mellon Foundation fellowships

Peter Kimani

Peter Kimani is an award-winning Kenyan author and journalist. He works across a broad spectrum of genres, from fiction to nonfiction, poetry and plays. His latest novel, Dance of the Jakaranda, was published in New York in February 2017, to great critical acclaim. It’s a New York Times Editors’ Choice, among other accolades. Kimani’s previous work includes Before The Rooster Crows and the children’s novel, Upside Down, for which he was awarded the 2011 Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, Kenya’s highest literary honour.

His poetry appears in several anthologies. He was one of only three international poets commissioned by National Public Radio to compose and recite a poem to mark Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.

Kimani received his formal education in Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States, where he earned a doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston in 2014.

Mamle Kabu

Mamle Kabu is a writer of Ghanaian and German parentage. Educated in Ghana and the UK, she has a BA/MA in Modern Languages and an M.Phil in Latin-American Studies from Cambridge University. She has lived in Ghana since 1992 and works as a freelance consultant in development issues. One of her short stories, ‘The End of Skill’, was nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009. Mamle has also been nominated for the 2011 Burt Award for children's writing, for her story ‘The Kaya-Girl’.

Masande Ntshanga

Masande Ntshanga is the author of the acclaimed novels The Reactive, shortlisted for the 2015 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize and longlisted for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature, and Triangulum, shortlisted for the 2020 Nomo Awards for Best Novel. He is the winner of the Betty Trask Award (2018), winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Richard Quaz Roodt

Richard Quaz Roodt is a poet and editor of poetrypotion.com. His poetry has appeared in numerous local and international literary magazines and anthologies. He facilitates the poetry programme for the University of Johannesburg's Arts Academy, and in 2018 he compiled and edited an anthology of poetry by students titled Footprints of the Heart. He is involved in numerous social outreach programmes around Johannesburg, and in 2016 Independent media named him one of South Africa’s top 100 inspiring and aspiring young people.

He is currently working on a collection of poetry that explores the historical relationship and current disconnect between Afrikaans and Khoekhoegowab. The collection interrogates the idea of a dying language as a receptacle of history. The poetry reads as a conversation between Afrikaans and Khoekhoegowab (the Khoekhoe language) and addresses issues such as land loss, religious persecution, the ‘dop system’, folklore, and the complex idea of so-called coloured identity in postcolonial South Africa.

Achal Prabhala

Achal Prabhala is a writer and activist for access to medicines in Bangalore. He works primarily in India, South Africa and Brazil. He writes for a range of small literary magazines (Bidoun, Chimurenga, Transition) and occasionally, for news outlets (The Guardian, The Intercept, the New York Times).

Most of Achal’s recent writing has been around access to treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus. Currently, he is working on a series of essays (on the work of Richard Rive, on affirmative action in Brazil, on Richmal Crompton's William books) and one larger project – the emergence of access to life-saving medicines as a popularly understood right, which will be articulated through a film, a podcast and a book.

Yewande Omotoso

Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados, grew up in Nigeria and currently lives in Johannesburg. Her debut novel, Bomboy, won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize. She has published stories in Kalahari Review, the Caine Prize Anthology, The Moth and One World Two. She has been a Norman Mailer Fellow, an Etisalat Fellow and a Miles Morland Scholar. Her second novel, The Woman Next Door, was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Aidoo-Snyder Prize, the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Prize and the UJ Literary Prize. It has been published in Italian and shortlisted for the 2019 Bottari Lattes Grinzane Literary Prize.

Sean Christie

Sean Christie is a Zimbabwean-born journalist and the author of Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard: Life Among the Stowaways, which won the 2017 Recht Malan Prize and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. He is currently working on a book that surfaces forgotten Johannesburg histories, styled as a journey down the abominably polluted Jukskei River, which rises in the heart of the city and ends at its northern limits. He has spent the last two years working with the medical humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders.