About Colleen Higgs

I’m a writer and a guerilla publisher. One of these days I hope to be able to say “I am an established independent publisher”.

I’ve had poems, stories, reviews, journalism and critical articles published in anthologies, magazines, journals and online over the past 18 years. I’ve also written and published three of my own books, and published three books by other writers, so far and am gestating a number of others.

I was born in Kimberley, and have lived in Welkom, Wepener, Maseru, East London and Joburg. I spent a year as an exchange student in Iowa in the year Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. I also lived on a communal farm near Grahamstown for a few years before moving to Cape Town in 2000.

My daughter is six, I am married to a sailor and I have a golden retriever, called Perry.

I’ve worked as as a teacher, a teacher trainer, a materials writer and an academic development lecturer. For over seven years I worked at the Centre for the Book, where amongst many other things I managed the award-winning Community Publishing Project, which included writing A rough guide to small-scale and self-publishing, and championing small publishing in South Africa. Maire Fisher and I co-edited The South African Small Publishers Catalogue and it was launched in time for the first Cape Town Book Fair in 2006.

In 2007 I started the small, independent press, Modjaji Books, which for now publishes the work of Southern African women.

My first collection of poems, Halfborn Woman was independently published in 2004 under the imprint Hands-On Books.