Performance in the Aftermath: Mourning and Memorialising District Six

Public lecture by Nadia Davids

Tue., March 25, 4:00pm-5:30pm EST

Location: Smith warehouse, Bay 4, Ahmadieh lecture hall

& via Zoom: register at https://duke.is/aftermath

Nadia Davids is a multi-hyphenate South African writer, scholar and former President of PEN South Africa, who works across a range of forms: novels, short-stories theatre and research. Her plays, At Her Feet, What Remains, Cissie and Hold Still have been staged throughout Southern Africa and in Europe. She has won the Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama and has twice won the Fleur du Cap for Best New South African Play.

Her debut novel, An Imperfect Blessing, was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature and her writing has been published in The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, Zyzzyva Magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was a 2023 Aspen Writer in Residence and won the 2024 Caine Prize for her short story 'Bridling'. Her novel, Cape Fever Simon and Schuster (US) and Scribner (UK)- will publish in 2025.

Nadia was awarded the University of Cape Town's first doctorate in Drama for a thesis entitled, Inherited Memories: Performing the Archive, on performative engagements with the archives of Apartheid Forced Removals in District Six. As an A.W. Mellon Fellow, she has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California Berkeley, at New York University and at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She taught drama at Queen Mary University of London where she was a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize and until 2022, was Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town where she now holds an Honorary Research Associateship at UCT. Nadia lives in California.