Josie

Jo-Anne's English Fan Club

Jo-Anne Richards wrote The Innocence of Roast Chicken, which was a best-seller in South Africa, and is in the process of turning into a film. Her second novel, Touching the Lighthouse, was launched in mid-November 1997, and her third, Sad at the Edges in 2003.

Josie with Zola Zembe and Dr Joyce Leeson in Manchester 1998

She spent her childhood in Port Elizabeth, and was educated at Collegiate Girls' High School. She graduated with a B. Journ. from Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1979 followed by Honours in Journalism and Linguistics and was been a practising journalist most of her working life: first for Evening Post in Port Elizabeth, The Cape Times, then the Sunday Express in Johannesburg, until it and its sister newspaper the Rand Daily Mail were closed down in 1985. Then, after spending much of the rest of the year wandering about Europe on her retrenchment pay (with a boyfriend in a kombi), she joined The Star where she worked till the day her daughter was born on 28.2.88. She had Joshua on 1.1.91 and then began freelancing then worked for the Mail and Guardian. Now she is convenor of the Hons in journalism and media studies at Wits University and teaches journalism skills to tender young post-grad minds.

Her father was a dentist and her mother a social worker who became a potter. Her brother, Graham, was an attorney and an ANC councillor in Port Elizabeth (when it was unbanned). He was responsible for opening the beaches to all races during the '80s, when he sued the Administrator of the Cape in his personal capacity for a declaratory order. He is now town clerk of Port Elizabeth and has just been appointed as responsible for organising the elections in Port Elizabeth next year. Her other brother, Guy, is a professor of medicine, a respiratory physician who is head of the Intensive Care Unit at the Johannesburg Hospital.

Josie's Children

She now lives in Parkwood, Johannesburg with her children, Emma and Joshua. Emma has Turner's Syndrome and Josie is National Chair of the South Africa Turner's Syndrome Support Group.

My house is old (by Joburg standards) and beautiful with big wooden windows, pressed steel ceilings, wooden floors, lead work in sliding doors, big wooden bookshelves with lead pane doors. Big sweeping garden with 2 big camphor trees, plum tree, and enormous oak.

Josie's trip to Maputo December 1998

Josie's trip to the Karoo December 1998

She has an exotic line in earrings but has not yet succumbed to body piercing except in that particular area.

Scorpio Productions, part of Pinewood Studios in London has bought the film rights. Jo-Anne has done a screen treatment of her book and may write the screenplay as well.

Reviews of Touching the Lighthouse:

Big Issue in the North 13/7/98

Richards is a white South African, and the events of the book - chiefly featuring two white South African women becoming aware of the inadequacies of the governing regime - intelligently capture her own insights. The work is inevitably political, but in a way which is human and wisely avoids simplifying such an involved setting.

The problems of apartheid - being governed by an alien culture refusing to assimilate most of the population - are combined with the difficulties of the characters to good effect. Touching the Lighthouse owes much of its impact to the grim reality of South Africa. The resentment felt towards even enlightened whites such as the book's Eastern Cape aristocrats indicates the levels of frustration and rage inside this most volatile of countries. Richards' sense of language is illustrative, but at times overly sentimental and serves to remind the reader thousands of miles away of the real people within real tragedies.

Mail to Jo-Anne Richards

My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan reviewed by Robin Hallett