Some of you might know her from her essays at Mail and Guardian’s Thought Leader. Others might have heard her fresh and interesting perspective on all sorts of issues when she’s been interviewed on SAFM and Cape Talk Radio in South Africa. Maybe you first found her at her blog, SiyandaWrites.com or her YouTube series, Africa This Week with Siyanda. However you know this young woman, one thing is certain—she is a rising star on this continent. To add to her many accomplishments, she was recently long-listed for the Short Story Day Africa Prize with the first short story she has ever finished writing (!?!).
I interviewed Siyanda and she said she was so excited when she’d heard she had been long-listed for the prize. And what is her story about? “The story follows the mental breakdown of a young Motswana student at the University of Botswana, in the vein of stream-of-consciousness. I hope in reading it one hears echoes of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and, if possible, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up. But that might be slightly ambitious.”
