Koleka Putuma

Koleka Putuma is a performance poet, arts facilitator and theatre practitioner. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4, BBC focus on Africa, Badilisha Poetry X-Change and TEDx, and is a resident poet of the collective Lingua Franca, and co-founder of the newly formed theatre companies, Velvet Spine and The Papercut Collective. Koleka was crowned South Africa’s first national slam champion in 2014. She has been named One of Africa’s top 10 poets by Badilisha, and one of the young pioneers who took South Africa by storm in 2015 by the Sunday Times.