Philippa Yaa de Villiers
South African writer
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born in Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although she was not told of it by her adoptive parents, a white family in apartheid South Africa, until she was 20 years old. She has commented that the negotiation of her situation has informed much of her writing. De Villiers studied journalism at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and obtained a degree in Dramatic Art and Scriptwriting from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is also a graduate of the Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris, France, where she studied mime and theatre. Returning to South Africa in 1998, she worked as an actor for two years, before Bell’s palsy forced her to consider an alternative career in writing.