Malika
Ndlovu’s words and productions have appeared on pages and
stages all over South Africa, in Austria, Uganda, USA, UK, Holland, Ireland,
Germany, Spain, Ethiopia, India and the Philippines. As a poet, playwright,
performer and arts project manager, Ndlovu’s contribution to (South) African
poetry and literature, via numerous writing groups, workshops and festivals
spans over 20 years. Between 2007 and 2011 she was project manager, then guest
curator/podcast presenter of the Africa Centre’s Badilisha Poetry X-Change, supporting
its evolution from live international festival to BadilishaPoetry.com, the
first ever Africa-focused poetry podcasting platform. She was a founder member
of Cape Town-based women writers’ collective WEAVE between 1998 and 2004, and
co-editor of their trailblazing multi-genre anthology WEAVE’s Ink @ Boiling Point: A selection of 21st Century Black Women’s
writing from the Southern Tip of Africa.
In 2004 she initiated And The Word Was Woman Ensemble. Listed
as a 2011 British Times’ “Top50 contemporary African artists to look out for”,
Ndlovu Malika was also a 2015 DAC’s Mbokodo Awards finalist. Her poetry collections include Born in Africa But (1999), Womb to World: A Labour of Love (2001),
Truth is both Spirit and Flesh (2008),
Invisible Earthquake: a Woman’s Journal through Stillbirth (2009), and
the published plays A Coloured Place
(1998), Sister Breyani (2010), and CLOSE (2017). She was 2018 National Book
Week project co-ordinator, curated the 2018 SA Book Fair’s #OURSTORIES
Storytelling Festival and the Keorapetse Kgositsile Poetry Café. Most recently she co-ordinated the
CoCreate –Poetica site-specific “poetry journeys”, was a panel host for the
2019 Open Book Festival events and is featured in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women
Poets, 2000-2018, a her-storical, groundbreaking multi-genre
anthology, compiled
and edited by Makhosazana Xaba, and published in July 2019 by UKZN Press.