Jo-Anne Richards grew up in
Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and was educated at Collegiate Girls' high school. Her first books that she read were
The Boy Next Door and
The Island of Adventure. She graduated from
Rhodes University in
Grahamstown in 1979, followed by an Honours degree in Journalism and Linguistics. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the
University of the Witwatersrand, where she was a lecturer in journalism for 15 years. Richards worked full-time for four South African newspapers –
The Star, the
Sunday Express, the
Cape Times and
Evening Post – reporting, sub-editing and news-editing. She has written features and supplements for numerous South African magazines and newspapers, including
Fair Lady,
Elle,
Diversions,
True Love, the
Sunday Times Magazine,
The Star and the
Mail & Guardian. Richards rose to prominence with her first novel,
The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996), which became a bestseller in her native country and was short-listed for the
M-Net Book Prize and nominated for the Impac International Dublin Literary Award. Richards wrote on concepts such as striving and slacking in a dead book proposal in the mid-1990s. == Career ==