Litnet

Jaco Wolmarans is a freelance writer, video producer and photographer in Cape Town. A former journalist, he cut his teeth in crime and crime reporting. With a background in military service in the South African Bush War, and extensive travels over Africa for his work, it was inevitable that he would turn his hand to fiction writing. 

His debut, BOS, was widely acclaimed for a new genre in Afrikaans literature: combining traditional special forces fiction with modern political intrigue, rhino poaching and third-force intelligence activities. 

His follow-up, the historical novel SKAG, built on this path and followed the political intrigue around South Africa’s nuclear bomb build in the late eighties, and the potential for disaster to the country’s fledgling democracy if these devices fell into right-wing hands. 

IVOOR followed BOS, pitching the special forces characters into a search for mysterious apartheid-era payments into offshore accounts and secretly repatriated decades later. The novel takes the characters back to their own bloody pasts as small-teams operators in Angola. IVOOR was a finalist in the ATKV Woordveertjie Awards for thrillers in 2022.

In DOLOS, the action moves to Mozambique, Islamic extremists and heroin smuggling, the characters caught in a bloody coup attempt. The novel brings together all the elements of Wolmarans’ fiction interests – the wealth of untapped stories in Southern Africa’s political and military past, corruption, conspiracy and political intrigue.