|
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers Foto: gezett
|
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (born 1966, Johannesburg, South Africa), daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, was adopted into a white family in Apartheid South Africa, a fact she first learnt at the age of 20.
“I felt as if the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain”, she says in an interview. But also: “as a mixed race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free”.
Sharpened through this paradoxical biography, her work raises questions of ethnic heritage, of exclusion and identity, in the most urgent and personal way. Her poems are enraged and melancholic, but also funny, and are often ironically self-reflexive in their social criticism: “Freedom Songs” that are easy neither on themselves nor the reader.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers studied journalism in Grahamstown, and in the late 90s studied acting in Paris. She spent some time in Los Angeles before returning to Johannesburg, where she did street theatre and completed a screenplay. Since then she has written numerous scripts for TV series, and in 2005 also wrote a play, “Where the Children Live”.
In 2006 her first book of poetry was published, “Taller than Buildings”, and in 2010 she followed up with “The Everyday Wife”. In 2009 she was Writer in Residence at the Villa Vollezele in Belgium, and in 2011, along with other awards, received the South African Literary Award.
Publications
Taller Than Buildings, Centre for the Book 2006
The Everyday Wife, Modjaji Books 2010