Diane Awerbuck


Diane Awerbuck is a South African novelist. Her most notable novel, Gardening at Night, won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2011, her collection of short stories, Cabin Fever, was published by Random House Struik. Her novel, Home Remedies, was published by Random House Struik in August 2012. She was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2014, and won the Short Story Day Africa competition the same year.
She taught at Rustenburg Girls' High School until 2002. Before this, she worked as a teacher of History at Cedar House; and of Narrative and Aesthetics at AFDA, the film school, both in Cape Town.
Her non-fiction has appeared in the Mail & Guardian. She reviews fiction for the South African Sunday Times.
Her essays and short stories are published regularly and her work has been translated into German, Swedish, Mandarin and Russian. Her doctorate is in trauma narratives: The Spirit and the Letter: Trauma, Warblogs and the Public Sphere.
Awerbuck also writes as "Frank Owen", a joint pseudonym used when collaborating with co-writer Alex Latimer. Their cowboy-apocalypse novel project South was published in 2016, with a second volume North following in 2018.

Works

Novels

Short stories

  • Cabin Fever, Umuzi / Random House Struik, 2011,

As editor

  • Commissioning Editor of Anthology, The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories, Umuzi Cape Town, 2013, E-Pub 978-1-4152-0568-6

Interviews

Aerodrome Interview with Jennifer Malec, Jennifer Malec,.

Magazine contributions