Litnet

Hamilton Wende is a freelance writer and television producer. He is a regular contributor to From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4 on the BBC. He has also contributed to the BBC World Service programme Letter. He is a columnist for The Star in Johannesburg and his articles have appeared in many international and South African newspapers and magazines, including National Geographic Traveler, The Chicago Tribune, GQ, Maclean’s Magazine in Canada, TravelAfrica in the UK, The New Zealand Herald, The Buffalo News in the US, The Sunday Times, Business Day, The Sunday Independent in Johannesburg, and many others.

He has been a guest on The Editors on the SABC and a guest lecturer at the Department of Journalism at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, the Creative Writing Department at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand, at the Durban Institute of Technology, the Cape Town Press Club, and the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. He has also appeared on a number of radio and television programmes, including MSNBC, SABC TV, AM Live,and on Radio 702.
         
He has written six books:

• House of War: a love story and thriller about searching for the lost diaries of Alexander the Great in the badlands of northern Afghanistan while being hunted by Al Qaeda. (Penguin, 2009)

• The King’s Shilling: a novel about WWI in East Africa. It has been on the bestseller lists in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban and was long-listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2006. (Jacana, April 2005)

• Deadlines from the Edge: Images of War from Congo to Afghanistan: stories about his journeys into different parts of the world while working as television news producer in different parts of Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan. (Penguin SA, 2003)

• True North: African Roads Less Travelled: a non-fiction account of his work as a journalist in Africa. It was nominated for the 1995 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. (William Waterman, Johannesburg, 1995)

• The Quagga’s Secret: a children’s picture book he wrote, which was selected as one of the 1995 South African Books of the Year by Jay Heale of Bookchat. In 1999 it was selected by Cambridge University Press in South Africa for an anthology of South African writing. (Gecko Books, Durban, 1995)

• Msimangu’s Words (as co-author): a young adults novel. It was a finalist in the Young Africa Awards 1992. (Maskew Miller Longman, 1996)

In television he has worked for a number of international networks, including CNN, BBC, NBC, ABC (Australia), SBS (Australia), NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) Al Jazeera English and a number of others. He has covered fifteen different wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The countries he has worked in include Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Eritrea, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.

Journey Into Darkness, a documentary on the genocide in Rwanda he worked on for the BBC with producer David Harrison and correspondent Fergal Keane, won the 1994 Royal Television Society’s International Current Affairs Award. A Life Less Fortunate, a film on children in South African prisons he worked on with Belinda Hawkins of SBS, won the 1999 United Nations Association of Australia Media Award.

Hamilton Wende graduated from Wits University in Johannesburg in 1984 with a BA, majoring in English and sub-majoring in Legal Theory and Drama and Film. He spent the years after that travelling through Europe, the US and Japan. He studied part-time courses in writing and journalism at New York University. He lived in Japan and the US, where he worked as a freelance writer and English teacher. He returned to South Africa in the early 1990s.