Petra Langa

Petra Langa grew up in Germany and immigrated to South Africa in 1993 when she was 25. She taught German at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Durban from 1994 to 2004 where she also obtained a PhD in German with a focus on migration literature. The next ten years, she spent in Moscow and Beijing as the South African Ambassador’s spouse doing fundraising work and shifting her writing from academic to fictional. Her novels reflect personal transitions from a village childhood on the German Baltic coast (A Year in the Village, 2015) to experiencing life on the brink of democracy in South Africa (Measures of Freedom, 2017) and in a newly evolved post-Apartheid South Africa (The Mask under the Skin, 2018), as well as observations from her time abroad in other countries (The Runners, 2020). Her latest work is a novella telling a modern day South African love story (Butterflies and Moths, 2020). She now lives in Pretoria, South Africa.