Diane Awerbuck
Diane Awerbuck is a teacher, writer and reviewer. Her first novel, Gardening at night, was awarded the Commonwealth Best First Book (Africa and the Caribbean). Her prize-winning short stories are collected in Cabin fever. Her thriller, Home remedies, is set in Fish Hoek. Awerbuck’s doctorate deals with how people write about trauma. Her most recent works are the short story collection Inside your body there are flowers and the collected conversations of her family, Tears before bedtime (both Karavan Press).
Open Book Festival 2025: an overview
2025-09-10"To make sense of things for yourself and then for others is a joyous burden, the purpose of many of these writers’ professional lives. They write for collective repair. We owe these diplomats a debt we cannot repay, except by buying their books. Reading their books. Talking about them. One audience member who attended every panel she could, commented quietly to me, 'Note to self: be like them.'"
Periscope: An overview of the Books on the Bay festival 2025
2025-03-17"Books on the Bay this weekend in Simonstown was a pretty special literary festival. Run with great vigour, insight and love by Darryl David, David Attwell and Karin Cronje, it brought together 30 South African and international writers and matched them with expert interviewers."
Short.Sharp.Stories anthology Fluid: interview with Diane Awerbuck, author of "The ones that got away"
2023-05-24"We all have those roads-in-the-yellow-wood dudes – the unready loves who left us, or we left. Sometimes, in the small, shuddery hours, they come back. I think about them; I’m glad I knew them."