UWC 60th Anniversary - Virtual Programme: Diana Ferrus

Описание: Today, we celebrate UWC alumna and former staff member, Ms Diana Ferrus. Ms Ferrus holds a postgraduate qualification from the Department of Women & Gender Studies and in 2016, after 25 years of service in the Department of Industrial Psychology, she retired. Ms. Ferrus is an internationally known and acclaimed writer, poet, and storyteller. Her work has had and continues to have a bearing and influence on matters of race, gender, class, and reconciliation. It has also become the prescribed text in High School curriculums across South Arica.

Best known for her internationally acclaimed 1998 poem about Khoisan woman, Sarah Baartman. Titled, “I’ve Come to Take You Home”, the poem then not only influenced governmental decision-making, policy, and French law but has also given rise to the return of Sarah Baartman’s remains to South Africa in 2002. Ms. Ferrus is also the author, co-editor and publisher of various collections of Afrikaans and English poetry, stories about Fathers and Daughters, and biographies of former apartheid and union activists. Her latest book, Vrede Kom Later, was launched in July 2018 and is dedicated to her late father, Jacobus Marinus Daniel Ferrus, who was a prisoner of war during World War 2.

As a woman with feminist ideologies, Ms. Ferrus is particularly interested in recording, narrating, and publishing the stories of Coloured and Black women in the South African context. Ms. Ferrus works tirelessly to create platforms for women poets and storytellers through her facilitation of creative writing workshops and the founding of Bush Poets, Women in Xchains, and The Mengelsmoes Digters. Ms. Ferrus is also the owner of the Cape Town-based publishing company, Diana Ferrus Publishers, where she’s had made many publications and fiercely promotes Afrikaans creative writing among local creatives.

In 2012, Ms Ferrus received the Inaugural Mbokodo Award for Poetry which seeks to celebrate published writers and performance poets utilising deep creative imagination and originality.

'I've Come To Take You Home' Sourced - Lief Vir Suid Afrika:    • South Africa  Diana Ferrus: "I've come to ...  

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