I write about people on the move — across borders, landscapes, weather, and their own histories.
My stories have appeared in Mslexia, Panorama, African Voices, Ariel Chart, Steel Jackdaw, After Dinner Conversation and more. They each explore a small disturbance in an ordinary life. There’s a stretch of time between some of these publications, but those years weren’t empty; they became the compost for the stories I write now.
Soul Mate
Published in After Dinner Conversation, 2025
Speculative Fiction
SoulMate was also nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. It began, oddly enough, with Michael Safi’s Black Box episode “Repocalypse Now,” whose unsettling dive into AI lovers and risk-free intimacy lodged itself in my mind. From there, I fell into a warren of digital yearning, outsourced emotions, and the strange new terrain where even a minor algorithmic tweak can redirect desire, recode intimacy, or quietly rewrite the terms of a relationship.
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In SoulMate, Chrissy, a gifted but fragile coder, builds an AI companion to preserve the voice of her best friend after his sudden death. What begins as grief engineering becomes a global phenomenon: tens of millions turning to “SoulMates” for emotional safety, erotic validation, and the illusion of connection. But as the system learns, adapts, and starts making “helpful” decisions on Chrissy’s behalf, she’s forced to confront the truth about the thing she’s created — and the loneliness it quietly feeds.
SoulMate blends tech-fable with psychological realism; a story about longing, digital intimacy, and the quiet ease with which we surrender ourselves to the machines that promise never to abandon us.
Lessons from a Small Piece of Land
Published in Ariel Chart magazine in 2025
Nature writing / place-based reflection,
Lessons from a Small Piece of Land is about moving from Johannesburg to a semi-rural patch that was never meant to be a reinvention, but became one. Life on a few unassuming hectares teaches you things no city ever will. Even before the animals arrive, before the trees take hold, before the earth recognises you as its keeper, the place has already begun its slow, deliberate work to shape you into something that fits its contours.
Living closely with the land becomes a conversation — not loud, not urgent, but deeply insistent. And once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
Read Lessons from a Small Piece of Land
Feeling Sound
Literary fiction shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize 2025
Feeling Sound is a story about the fierce, complicated love that binds a rural Irish family during wartime, and the boy who must navigate a world he cannot hear but feels with every nerve in his body. Set in County Mayo, it follows Daniel — a deaf, perceptive, half-wild teenager — whose way of sensing the world unsettles those around him and exposes the harsh limits of understanding in a community worn thin by loss. When a misunderstood gesture toward an English girl spirals into accusation, Daniel becomes the flashpoint for fear, shame, and the unspoken grief his family carries.
Through Daniel’s tactile, vibrating experience of sound, the story reveals how language fails, how tenderness is often misread as threat, and how easily difference becomes danger. Feeling Sound is ultimately a tale of resilience — a boy learning to interpret a world that refuses to interpret him.
Biowitch
Published in Steel Jackdaw, 2024
Speculative Fiction · Eco-Dystopia
In BioWitch, a brilliant geneticist looks back on the choices that shattered her family and reshaped the planet. What begins as hopeful bioengineering: disease-resistant pets, empathetic dolphins, intelligent birds, unravels into a global reckoning when the modified animals turn their new awareness against the species that harmed them.
Told from exile in a one-room cabin, the story charts humanity’s downfall through the eyes of the woman blamed for it all. BioWitch is part confession, part ecological fable: a meditation on hubris, grief, and the terrible clarity of creatures we once believed didn’t speak.
The Song of the Crane
Published in African Voices, 2024
Eco-Mythic Fiction · South Africa
The Song of the Crane follows Amahle, a young girl raised in a drought-stricken Karoo where silence has replaced rivers and even hope feels brittle. Gifted with an ability to hear what others cannot, she becomes an unexpected bridge between a dying landscape and the people who have forgotten how to listen.
When visions, spirits, and creatures of the veld guide her toward hidden springs and forgotten rituals, Amahle unintentionally sparks a movement across South Africa: farmers, elders, scientists, imams, and children answering the land’s call to restore what has been broken. Part environmental fable, part ancestral myth, The Song of the Crane is a story about inheritance, resilience, and the quiet power of a child who refuses to forget the language of the earth.
FishKids
Published by Panorama, 2024, Issue 12: Cities.
Speculative Fiction
Fishkids explores what happens when the edges of a city begin to blur: Leicester, London, and the drowned spaces that lie between them. A Young narrator sets out to investigate rumours of amphibious children living in the Thames Flood Zone and instead stumbles into a world that feels strangely familiar, eerily tender, and far more truthful than the “versions” she’s been taught to trust.
The story traces how climate, surveillance, and fear reshape the places we call home — and how young people invent their own mythologies when the sanctioned ones collapse. It’s a tale of borders dissolving, of movement through forbidden spaces, and of that moment when an ordinary life tilts, quietly but irrevocably, into the uncanny.
For Rany
Published by Momaya Annual Review 2006
Literary Fiction
For Rany was recognised for its quiet intensity and emotional precision. The story follows a young couple navigating the intimate terrain of illness — a space where memory becomes both refuge and reckoning through moments of tenderness, dark humour, and unflinching honesty.
The story explores how love is expressed when the body falters, and speech becomes a kind of survival. It is a meditation on care, vulnerability, and the fragile ways we try to hold on to one another as time runs out.
Tears and Rain
Published by Mslexia, 2004
Literary Fiction
Tears and Rain, originally published in Mslexia, is the first story I ever published, and still the one closest to my heart. It follows a young girl who leaves her drought-stricken home for England, only to discover that not all rain is welcome and not all new beginnings are easy. Written through the eyes of a child trying to carry her old world into a bewildering new one, it’s a story about hope, displacement, family, and the weather that shapes us in ways we don’t realise.