Karen Jennings

Karen Jennings (born 1982) is a South African author born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1982, the daughter of an Afrikaans mother and an English father; both of her parents were teachers. She has master's degrees in English literature and creative writing from the University of Cape Town,and a PhD in creative writing from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has done post-doctoral research at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, on the historical relationship between science and literature, with particular reference to eusocial insects.In 2022, Jennings was a postdoctoral writer in residence(Department of History) as part of the Biography of an Uncharted People Project at LEAP, lStellenbosch. Quotes I started speaking quite late – my mother even took me to a specialist to see if I was okay. But when I did start speaking it was in both languages and in full sentences. We had a rule in our family – we spoke English to my dad and Afrikaans to my mom. As for the books – yes, it was a very bookish childhood. My favourite book as a small child was 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, by W.C. It is hard to say. I can’t pinpoint an exact moment. I suppose it happened incrementally. I knew that I wanted to write, but I don’t know that I put much thought into the idea of having a calling. It was just part of me and that was that. I do remember writing a poem at the age of about six or so, about water from the irrigation system dripping in the garden. I remember being thrilled by the feeling of writing and then of having written. I even typed it up on the family typewriter afterwards! I talk about this quite a bit with my husband – he is Brazilian and so he has questions about what it was like growing up in South Africa. I remember things that were so ordinary then, but which are shocking in retrospect. Pre-1994, we used to get the police coming to school often to give talks about how to identify bombs. Can you imagine that – six years old and knowing what different kinds of homemade explosive devices might look like. We also used to have to do special drills at school – hide under our desks in case of attacks. There is one moment that I remember distinctly. It was 1990 and I was seven. A boy at school said to me, ‘Nelson Mandela is a murderer and he is being let out of jail and he is coming to kill you.’ That night at supper I said, ‘I hate Nelson Mandela’ without having any idea of who he was other than a man that this boy had said was coming to kill me. My parents were outraged and gave me a very long lecture External links Category: Living people