User:JAW0306/Jenny Hobbs

Jenny Hobbs is a novelist and freelance journalist who lives in Franschhoek in the Western Cape, South Africa. She reviewed books for many years and has also written for radio and worked on TV book programmes as organiser, scriptwriter, presenter and interviewer. In 2006 she was part of the team that created the first Franschhoek Literary Festival (held in May 2007) and is now the FLF Director.

Life

Hobbs was born in Durban, schooled in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and studied for a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English and Geography at the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg).

After university, she worked as a supply teacher in London before marrying and settling on a smallholding near Johannesburg. She relocated to the Cape in 2006.

Hobbs’ work has been published in most South African newspapers and magazines. For seven years it included the first regular column in South African English, starring Blossom Broadbeam, the subject of her first book of collected columns, Darling Blossom (Don Nelson, 1979).

From 1978 to 1982 she was Features Editor on Thandi magazine, then part of Bona, and her experiences during those years led to her second book, an illustrated first aid manual in basic English called First Aid for the Family (Southern Book Publishers, in association with the South African Red Cross, 1987).

Though she now concentrates on full-length fiction, Hobbs' short stories have been published in Contrast, New South African Writing and various anthologies both in South Africa and internationally (and broadcast by the SABC and the BBC).

She is the author of five adult novels, a novel for teenagers and a collection of quotes about writers and writing.

Helping to promote reading in South Africa has been a decades-long concern for Hobbs. Over the years she has been involved in a number of reading initiatives and focuses now on the efforts of the Franschhoek Literary Festival and its FLF Library Fund to create a vibrant reading culture in the Western Cape.

Fiction

• Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, Michael Joseph, 1989
• The Sweet-Smelling Jasmine, Michael Joseph, 1993
• Video Dreams, Penguin, 1995
• The Telling of Angus Quain, Jonathan Ball, 1997
• Kitchen Boy, Umuzi, 2011
• The Miracle of Crocodile Flats, Umuzi, 2012

Nonfiction

• First Aid for the Family, Southern Book Publishers, 1987
• Paper Prophets: A Treasury of Quotations About Writers and Writing, Zebra Press, 1998
• Pees & Queues (co-authored with Tim Couzens), Spearhead, 1999

Short Stories

• Darling Blossom, Don Nelson, 1979