Bio

Dr. Lizzy Attree is co-founder of the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London, on the literary responses to HIV and AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe (1990 - 2005) and she is the author of Blood on the Page (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), a collection of interviews with the first African writers from Zimbabwe and South Africa to write about HIV and AIDS.

She was the UK director of Short Story Day Africa for 6 years and was director of the Caine Prize for African Writing from 2014 to 2018. In 2015, she taught African literature at Kings College London, and she teaches narratives of change via world literature at Richmond, the American University in London.

She was the producer of an Arts Council–funded project on African footballers at Chelsea and Arsenal, and the associated anthology of poems, Thinking Outside the Penalty Box, was published by the Poetry Society.

Most recently she worked part-time for 4 years as the Office Manager at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency and was the Editorial Assistant for 100 Days, 100 Stories: Rwandan Voices on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi (Huza Press, 2024).