Nadia Davids

Nadia Davids is a writer, theatre-maker and scholar whose work - critical and creative- engages post-Apartheid and post-colonial archives, posing questions around race, trauma, cultural memory, place, home, exile, resistance, and restitution. Her plays At Her Feet, Cissie, and What Remains have garnered various theatre awards and nominations (twelve Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards, one Noma, one Naledi), been staged locally and internationally, and are published by Oxford University Press and WITS University Press. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing (published by Umuzi Random House,) was long-listed for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award and shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Prize and the Pan-African Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Davids holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town and, as an A.W. Mellon Fellow, has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California Berkley and at New York University. Between 2009-2016 she lectured at Queen Mary University of London and while there, was a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for her creative work and critical research, as well as a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for a project on race and queerness in Cape Town’s beauty pageants. In 2018 she took up an Associate Professorship in the University of Cape Town’s Department of English Literary Studies.
Her personal essays have appeared in the Mail and Guardian, the Johannesburg Review of Books and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s presented programs for the BBC and her work has been featured on CNN.
In 2017 she was elected to the office of President of PEN South Africa. She hosts PEN SA’s literary-political podcast, The Empty Chair.