Leon Lazarus

Leon Lazarus is a South African writer, artist, and creative director who grew up on the edge of white suburbia during apartheid. He studied at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, where, in the late 1980s, he hosted a student radio show and played bass and sang in the Leather Omnibus, a multiracial apartheid-busting student band that won him few friends in the security police.

He has spent more than three decades in advertising, design, and publishing on two continents. He also co-hosts Tune Me What?, a podcast celebrating the history of South African music.

Barking at Dogs, his debut collection, gathers his apartheid-era youth into short stories that are by turns riotous and tender, true and true-ish.