John Conyngham

John Conyngham, was born in Durban in 1954 and educated in South Africa, England and Ireland. He is the author of three novels, The Arrowing of the Cane, which was joint winner of the AA Mutual-Ad Donker Vita Award and winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize and Sanlam Award, The Desecration of the Graves, which was shortlisted for the M-Net Award, and The Lostness of Alice. Other than in South Africa, his work has been published in the United Kingdom and United States and translated into a number of languages. For thirty-one years he was a journalist on The Witness (formerly The Natal Witness) in Pietermaritzburg, and was from 1994 to 2010 the newspaper's editor. He is a former Southern African Poynter Fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St Petersburg, Florida, and Reuters Fellow at Oxford University.