About

To keep my imagination alive is essential to living  with veracity and vigour.  John Keats wrote in a letter, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination."

I was born in 1964 in Middelburg, Mpumalanga province, spent my childhood in eMalahleni (previously Witbank) and have lived in Durban, in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province for most of my adult life.

I pursued my fascination with the sound and shapes of words through an Honours degree in Afrikaans and Nederlands literature and after four years of teaching Afrikaans to teenagers, I made a career in educational technology.  I have worked in eLearning support at the Durban University of Technology since 1994.

As child, my poetic ear was tuned by learning by heart and reciting verses from the 1953 translation of the Afrikaans Bible, which my grandmother loved -- and at twelve, poems from Antjie Krog's Dogter van Jefta (Daughter of Jefta). At university it was Wilma Stockenström's novel  Die Kremetart-ekspedisie (The Expedition to the Baobab Tree) which grew on me; and as post-graduate student, works which stretched my mind were Breyten Breytenbach's poetry book Lotus and Hennie Aucamp's cabaret Slegs vir Almal (Only for Everyone). The works of Dutch artist and poet Pierre Kemp also settled in my heart; and at a time when our country was in the grip of a state of emergency in the late eighties and early nineties, I found a beacon in the counter-culture of the  Afrikaans resistance artists (see "Afrikaners is Plesierig! Voëlvry Music, Anti-apartheid Identities and Rockey Street Nightclubs in Yeoville (Johannesburg), 1980s–90s", published in African Studies).