Phillippa Yaa de Villiers writes, performs and teaches Creative Writing at Wits University, Johannesburg. Her poetry collections are Taller than buildings (2006) and The everyday wife (2010, winner of the South African Literary Prize in 2011), and ice- cream headache in my bone (August 2017). Her short story Keeping Everything the Same was longlisted for the Pen/Studinski Prize in 2007, and her story The day that Jesus dropped the ball won the 2007 Het Beschrijf/National Arts Festival Prize at the Grahamstown Festival. She co-edited No Serenity Here, an anthology of African poetry translated into Mandarin. (2010). Her semi-autobiographical one-woman show Original Skin has toured South Africa and performed in Germany.
She has read and performed at poetry festivals in Germany, Denmark, UK, Cuba, Sweden, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Ghana. Her work is translated into French, Dutch, Flemish, Burmese, Mandarin, Italian, German and Spanish. She serves on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and in the South African Poetry Project’s Indigenous Knowledge Research.