Lutz van Dijk, PhD, a German-Dutch writer, was born in Berlin in 1955, and taught in Hamburg for several years at a school for children with special needs. Afterwards, he became a consultant for intercultural education at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. During the apartheid years he was refused entry into South Africa because of his human rights activities in Europe. He visited South Africa for the first time in 1997, and has been living in Cape Town since 2001.
He is a co-founder of the HOKISA Non Profit organisation (see also www.hokisa.co.za) that cares for children affected by HIV/AIDS in Masiphumelele township in Cape Town.

In 1997 he was awarded the Youth Literature Prize of Namibia. His novel for young readers, Stronger than the Storm, received the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. His second novel for young people, Themba (Crossing the Line), was published in 2006 in English, Xhosa, Afrikaans and German. He has also published a love story, Romeo and Jabulile, set during the period of intense xenophobic violence that erupted in South Africa in May 2008, (Maskew Miller Longman, 2010.)

Together with Karin Chubb, he published a report in 2001 titled Between Anger and Hope (with a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu) on the testimony of children and young people at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). A History of Africa, originally published in 2004 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, has also been published in translation in Korea and China.