Poet and Writer

Genna Gardini excels in every form of writing: as a poet she was long-listed for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award and was named Art South Africa’s 9th Bright Young Thing. As a playwright her WinterSweet won a Standard Bank Encore Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival in 2012 and she returns to Grahamstown this year with Scrape, a play produced by Horse’s Head Productions, a company she founded with Gary Hartley. Gardini recently completed a feature-length screenplay. Somehow this 26-year-old still finds time to write articles for Art South Africa and the Cape Times, curate monthly readings for new playwrights and tutor students while completing her master’s in Theatremaking at the University of Cape Town, all this while tweeting 140-character posts. Poets, Gardini says, “dig out moments that fall between the cracks of ordinary life and analyse them like archaeologists of meaning”. There’s nothing ordinary about her life.

— Rudi Benadé

Twitter: @gennacide