Fred Khumalo

AboutFred Khumalo

Fred Khumalo is a novelist and short-story writer based in Johannesburg. The author of 12 books, his latest work is Heart of a Strong Woman, the best-selling autobiography of Xoliswa Nduneni­Ngema, the co-creator of the hit musical Sarafina! His famous novel Dancing the Death Drill, based upon the SS Mendi sinking during the First World War, won the 2019 Humanities and Social Sciences Award. Dancing the Death Drill will be released in the German language at the end of 2021, by Interkontinental, in Berlin. His other books are Talk of the Town and Other Stories (short stories), The Longest March (novel), Bitches’ Brew (novel), Touch My Blood (autobiography), Ngenxa yeMendi (a Zulu novel), Seven Steps to Heaven (novel), Zulu Boy Gone Crazy (essays),  UManzekhofi nezakhe (a collection of Zulu short stories), The Lighter Side of Life on Robben Island (essays) #ZuptasMustFall and Other Rants (essays). He has been shortlisted twice for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and once for the Short Story Day Africa Award. He has also been shortlisted three times for the Miles Morland Scholarship for Writers. Fred Khumalo holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from WITS University. He is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World (Cologne, Germany), a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and a Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. He is also a Ph.D. (Creative Writing) candidate at the University of Pretoria. In 2021 he was appointed Adjunct Professor of African Literature at the University of South Africa.