Zukiswa Wanner has accepted our invitation to be our keynote speaker at this year's luncheon. Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book The Madams, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg(2014). In 2014 Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature. In 2020 she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Wanner the first African woman to win the award. Just this March, Wanner published an essay on Brittle Paper contemplating and arguing for “The Writer’s Voice in a Political, Social and Artistically-Conscious World.” Wanner founded a publishing house “with which she wants to get young Africans in particular to read. And she interferes politically: for democracy, freedom of opinion, LGBTIQ, women's rights, for the future of the African continent.” During the pandemic, she founded and curated a Pan-African online literature festival in response to the lock down.