Nokugcina Elsie Mhlophe was born on 24 October 1958 in Hammarsdale to a Xhosa mother and Zulu father. She matriculated at the Mfundisweni High School in the Transkei in 1979 and briefly worked as a housemaid in Johannesburg before beginning as a cadet journalist at Rhodes University. After a brief course in filmmaking she started as a newsreader for the Press Trust, BBC Radio’s Africa Service and ZBC.

Mhlophe went on to establish herself as a multi-talented multilingual actor and activist, poet and playwright, composer and director, infusing storytelling with poetry. Widely translated into all of South Africa’s official languages as well as internationally, into German, French, Italian, Swahili and Japanese, Mhlophe has received a terrific array of prizes and awards, including the BBC Africa Service for Radio Drama, the Edinburgh Festival's Fringe First Award, the Josef Jefferson Award, and the OBBIE. An ardent campaigner for literacy, Mhlophe’s endeavours in this regard have been recognised with honorary doctorates from the Universities of London, KwaZulu Natal, Pretoria and Fort Hare. Her guest appearance at the 2006 FIFA World Cup South African handover ceremony in Germany and the Arctic Winter Games in Canada, 2010, brought South Africa’s rich cultural heritage to the world’s attention.

Stephen Watson was born in Cape Town in 1954. He studied at the University of Cape Town, where he was a professor in the English Department. He published nine collections of poetry, most recently The Light Echo (Penguin, 2007), and three books of non-fiction. His most recent book, The Music in the Ice (Penguin Books, 2010), is a collection of essays on “writers, writing, and other things”. He has also edited a number of books, including A City Imagined (Penguin Books, 2006). In 2000 he became the director of UCT’s widely acclaimed Centre for Creative Writing. Students he has mentored and supervised include the award-winning novelist Ceridwen Dovey and Tania van Schalkwyk, recent winner of the Ingrid Jonker Prize for English Poetry. He passed away on 10 April 2011 and will be sorely missed by many in the South African literary community.

For the past four decades Wilma Johanna Stockenström has been enriching Afrikaans literature with her satirical, obstinate and compassionate voice. Along with Elisabeth Eybers, Sheila Cussons, Ina Rousseau and Antjie Krog, she remains one of the most important women writers in Afrikaans.

She was born on 7 August 1933 in Napier in the Overberg district, where she also completed high school in 1949. She studied at the University of Stellenbosch, obtaining a BA (Drama) in 1952. She worked as a radio announcer in Cape Town for a year before moving to Pretoria in 1954 where she married Ants Kirsipuu, an Estonian by birth and a language philosopher by trade. For a while she worked as a translator and later as an actress. She has been living in Cape Town since 1993.