Nadia Davids is a South African writer who works across a range of forms: novels, short-stories theater and screenplays. Her plays At Her Feet, Cissie, What Remains and Hold Still have been staged throughout Southern Africa and in Europe. Her short fiction has been published in The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Zyzzyva Magazine. She won the 2022 Olive Schreiner Prize for theater, has twice won the Fleur du Cap for Best New South African Play and was a 2023 Aspen Writer in Residence. Her story ‘Bridling’ won the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her debut novel, An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for the Pan African Etisalat Prize in 2014 and her novel, Cape Fever- acquired by Simon and Schuster (US) - will be published in 2026.

Nadia was awarded the University of Cape Town’s first doctorate in Drama in 2008 for a thesis entitled, ‘Inherited Memories: Performing the Archive”. Her PhD focused on performative engagements with the archives Forced Removals in District Six-a neighbourhood from which her own family members has been removed. Her research examines Apartheid, race, trauma, cultural memory, place, home, exile, creativity, resistance, and restitution through the lens of performance and ‘post-memory’. An A.W. Mellon Fellow, Nadia has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California Berkley and at New York University and in 2018 she was a visiting scholar at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Between 2009-2016 she lectured at Queen Mary University of London and while there, was a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for her creative work and critical research on the uncovering of a burial ground for historically enslaved people in Cape Town. Between 2018 and 2022 she was an Associate Professorship in the University of Cape Town’s Department of English Literary Studies.

Her academic writing has appeared in The Drama Review, Wasafiri, the South African Theatre Journal, Social Dynamics and Safundi. She served on the Editorial Advisory Board for Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge University Encyclopaedia of Stage Directors and Directing.

Davids is the former President of PEN South Africa.

You can read more about Nadia’s work here.