Alert! Margie Orford has been elected to the board of PEN international, the non-political organisation established to promote global literature and freedom of expression.
Orford, a celebrated novelist and award-winning journalist, is the president of the South African charter, a position she has held since June this year. Orford is renowned for her crime writing, but has also produced non-fiction, children’s books and school textbooks, and is also a film director.
Orford follows in the footsteps South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who held the position of Vice President of PEN International until she passed away in July this year. During the 2014 Open Book Festival Orford paid tribute to Gordimer, reading from her one of her favourite of the Nobel Laureate’s books, July’s People.
Press release
Award-winning journalist and acclaimed South African writer Margie Orford has been elected to the international board of PEN International, a 10-person body that represents authors, poets, editors and other writers in more than 100 countries around the world. Orford, who is President of the South African PEN Centre, was nominated by a delegate from Denmark, seconded by a delegate from Mexico, and was elected at the PEN International Congress at Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan earlier this month by what a delegate later described as “a great vote”.
Orford joined SA PEN in June 2006 and was appointed Executive Vice President in 2010 and President in June this year following the death of President Anthony Fleischer, author and former General Manager of SA Associated Newspapers (now the Times Media Group).
Orford is a celebrated crime writer. Her novels have been translated into nine languages and include the Clare Hart series of crime thrillers. She obtained a BA Hons degree at the University of Cape Town, writing her final examinations while in prison after having being detained as a student activist in the State of Emergency of 1985.
After travelling widely, she studied under the South African writer, JM Coetzee, and worked in publishing in the newly-independent Namibia, where she became involved in training through the African Publishers Network. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and while in New York she worked on a ground-breaking archival retrieval project, Women Writing Africa: The Southern Volume, published by the Feminist Press.
As a journalist, Orford wrote for The Guardian, the Observer and The Telegraph in Britain and for the Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Cape Times in South Africa. She has published children’s books, academic books, school text books and non-fiction, including a book on climate change, on rural development in South Africa, and a history of the anti-apartheid group, The Black Sash. Her publications include:
Water Music (Oshun Books, 2013), The Magic Fish (2012), Gallows Hill (Oshun Books, 2011), The Little Red Hen (2011), Daddy’s Girl (Oshun Books, 2009), Like Clockwork (Oshun Books, 2006), Fabulously 40 And Beyond: Coming Into Your Power An Embracing Change (2006), Busi’s Big Idea (2006), Blood Rose (2006), Dancing Queen (2004), Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism: Stories from the Developing World (2004), Rural Voice: The Social Change Assistance Trust, 1984-2004, Working in South Africa (David Philip, 2004).
She is the patron of Rape Crisis and of the children’s book charity, the Little Hands Trust.
Orford follows the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer who was appointed Vice President of PEN International, a position she held until her death.
South African PEN Centre Vice President, Dr Raymond Louw, said he is delighted that as a member of the influential international board of PEN Margie Orford will be able to promote the interests of writers and editors in the sub-continent of Africa where they struggle to meet the many and diverse challenges posed not only by the social and geographical environments but by the frequently severe inroads of governments on their freedoms. She has already made a powerful impact in her short period at PEN International congresses, the latest being at the congress this month where she invoked the World Association of Newspapers Declaration of Table Mountain calling for countries to scrap criminal defamation and “insult” laws as well as other restrictions on the press and writers. This resulted in the congress passing a resolution making a similar call on world nations. The timing is particularly appropriate for South Africa because the appeal by a former Sowetan journalist, Cecil Motsepe, against a conviction for criminal defamation is currently being heard in the Gauteng High Court.
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Book details
- Water Music by Margie Orford
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EAN: 9781868423965
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- Like Clockwork by Margie Orford
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EAN: 9781868424061
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- Daddy\’s Girl by Margie Orford
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EAN: 9781868424030
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- Blood Rose by Margie Orford
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EAN: 9781868424023
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