Dr Phillippa Yaa de Villiers studied Journalism at Rhodes University and theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, before completing a MA at Lancaster University and a PhD at Wits university, where she now lectures Creative Writing. She is a Distinguished Alumnus of Rhodes University Journalism and Media Studies (2022). A member of the Theatresports company and movement teacher at the Market Theatre Laboratory, she later worked as a television screenwriter for ten years. She wrote Original Skin with Robert Colman, who directed the one woman show, which toured South Africa and Germany. Her poetry collections are Taller than buildings (2006), The everyday wife (2010) and ice- cream headache in my bone (2017). She co-edited The Poems of Keorapetse Kgositsile 1969-2018 (2023). Her fiction and poems appear in New Daughters of Africa (2019), Yellow Means Stay (2019) Relations (2023) among many others, including the journals Botsotso, Stanzas and New Coin. Her scholarly work has appeared in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on South African Poets (2019), Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma (2023), The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making and Meaning (2024), and Fragments d’un temps suspendu: 44 lettres d’ecrivains sur le confinement (2025). Her long poem Riding out the Water is forthcoming.
