Jayne Bauling
Until two years ago I lived mostly in Gauteng when I wasn’t travelling – a major passion – mainly in Asia. There was also a Cape Town interlude. A couple of early, definitely naïve poems found homes in now long-defunct journals, but then poetry lost out to a career in women’s fiction for many years (17 novels published in the UK). Now here I am, belatedly exploring new literary directions, seemingly reinventing myself, plus trying life in Mpumalanga – but I get back to Jozi regularly because it’s cities and their people that make me write.
In 2008 Jayne was awarded the Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa for novel E Eights; her poem "Fist" was awarded the 3rd prize at the third POWA Women's Writing project, she published in Breaking the Silence, Murmurs of the Girl in Me and her poem "Symbiosis" won the SAFM Express Yourself poetry prize in 2007.
2021 Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature shortlist: an interview with Jayne Bauling
2021-05-26"It’s rewarding and challenging to write for readers who are no longer children but who feel things intensely."