Henk Rossouw (2005 - 2006)

South Africa

Henk Rossouw was born in Cape Town and earned his BA from the University of Witwatersrand. In 1999, he survived a bomb explosion in a bar, and later published an account in The Threepenny Review. From 2001 to 2005, he worked as a foreign correspondent for Washington DC's The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting from countries like Rwanda, Liberia, the Dem. Rep. of the Congo, and Uganda. During this period he also wrote for Newsweek and covered the Zimbabwean elections for MSNBC.com. He turned to fiction in early 2005, while documenting the Aids epidemic in rural South Africa for six months.

After moving to Montreal to take up a Sauvé Scholarship, Henk attended the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop '06 and earned a work-study fiction scholarship to the 2006 Breadloaf Writers' Conference, in Vermont. He is the winner of the 2006 Summer Literary Seminars/Kenya fiction contest, and the winning story was selected for publication by Tin House magazine.

Henk now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.A., where he's studying towards his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts. Currently, he works as an adviser to undergraduate students.

Links:

• Henk's blog
• McGill Daily Paid In Full: South African journalist fuses creativity and truth