Koleka Putuma, South Africa

Koleka Putuma, born in 1993 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, lives in Cape Town and works as a poet, playwright and director. A prizewinning Spoken Word artist, she took the literary world by storm with her first book of verse, Collective Amnesia, which is currently in its ninth edition and has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Danish and German, and is on the curriculum at universities in South Africa and Sweden. Jamal Tuschick wrote in Der Freitag that “Her poems are the foundation for an aesthetics of resistance.” They speak of inequality and violence – directly, powerfully and overwhelmingly. Pain and joy, mourning and memory, love and sex all have a place in them.