Archive and Public Research Fellow and Lecturer: University of Cape Town

Dr Hedley Twidle grew up in Aggeneys, a mining town that “made Pofadder look like the Big City”, before travelling to Oxford, where he read English and worked as a barman and as a “jumper-outer” in the haunted vaults of Edinburgh. He completed his doctorate at York University, the result of which is a cultural biography of Main Road, Sea Point, soon to be released as a monograph entitled Sea | Point | Contact. He has written for the New Statesman and the Financial Times and has contributed to various journals and books, including the Cambridge History of South African Literature. At UCT he teaches and supervises students from first year to master’s and also teaches community leaders in Khayelitsha as part of the Equal Education campaign. In 2012 he won the FT/Bodley Head Prize for his essay on what it means to be a lecturer at UCT, the university “where JM Coetzee’s pigeonhole lingers”.

— Rudi Benadé

Website: seapointcontact.wordpress.com