The name of her production is No Easter Sunday for Queers and it has won Koleka Putuma the Distell National Arts Festival Playwright Competition this year.
Her accolades are well deserved as this talented young lady is already the 2018 Forbes Africa Under 30 Honouree, a recipient of the 2018 Imbewu Trust Scribe Playwriting Award and was as a Rising Star at the 2017 South African Mbokodo Awards. Last year, she was also the recipient of the CASA playwrighting award.
Says the National Arts Festival: “Putuma’s work insists on visibility and offering healing. In it, she explores the idea of authority in various spaces – academia, religion, politics, relationships – to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt. She is particularly interested in how narrative making can be a catalyst for healing, resistance and excavating memory.”
Watch: Congratulations to Award-winning Author & Poet @KPutuma who has been named the winner of the @artsfestival Distell National Playwright Competition. Koleka Putuma is also the author of Best Selling Book, Collective Amnesia which has been translated into Spanish & Danish. pic.twitter.com/EYJiHLTiyx
— Min. Nathi Mthethwa (@NathiMthethwaSA) March 7, 2019
Many will know Putuma for her bestselling debut collection of poems Collective Amnesia. Since its publication in April 2017, the book is in its 9th print run and has been prescribed for study at tertiary level in South African Universities and Gothenburg University in Sweden. It was recently translated into Spanish and released in Madrid by Flores Rara.