Cove Park’s International Literature Residency supports a significant international writer at a key stage in their work. We offer the writer time and space to pursue a project or new ways of working free from the pressure of specified outcomes, in a changing community of artists across a range of art-forms, career stages and nationalities. Previous International Writers include Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Fred D’Aguiar and Christos Tsiolkas.

Margie Orford is an internationally acclaimed writer and journalist. Her Clare Hart novels – a literary crime fiction series that explores violence and its effects in South Africa – are published in the USA and the UK and have been widely translated into more than ten languages. In addition to her fiction, she writes regularly about crime, gender violence, politics and freedom of expression, and literature. She has written a number of children’s books and several works of non-fiction on subjects ranging from climate change to rural development.

She was born in London to South African parents, but grew up in Namibia and South Africa where she  was educated at the University of Cape Town. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1999 and has Masters in Comparative Literature from the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

She is a member of the executive board of PEN International, the president of  PEN South Africa, the patron of Rape Crisis and of the children’s book charity, the Little Hands Trust.