Gillian Slovo

Gillian Slovo is a South African born author, journalist and playwright resident in the UK. She has written thirteen previous novels including Ten Days and Red Dust, which won the RFI Temoin du Monde prize in France and was made into a film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Her novel Ice Road was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction and her family memoir, Every Secret Thing, was an international bestseller. She has created four verbatim plays including Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, co-written for the Tricycle Theatre, which played in theatres around the world including New York, Chicago and Washington DC. Her play Grenfell – In the Words of Survivors was put on by London’s National Theatre and St. Ann’s Theatre in New York. In 2009 she won an Amnesty media award for her article on children in detention. From 2010-2013 she was president of English PEN, and she is also a member of the Royal Society of Literature.