Bio

Dr. Lizzy Attree is co-founder of the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, and works as a freelance writer, literary curator and editor.

She was the UK director of Short Story Day Africa for 6 years and was director of the Caine Prize for African Writing from 2014 to 2018.

On 27 February 2025, the first in a monthly series of in conversation, live literary events Stars on Moon Lane began at Moon Lane Ink in Lewisham, south London. Continuing 3rd Thursday evenings from 20th March.

In 2015, she taught African literature at Kings College London; has taught Contemporary African Migration in Literature and Film at Goldsmiths (2019), and currently teaches narratives of change and contemporary London literature at Richmond, the American University in London.

In July 2025 Dr Attree will teach Global Literatures: Han Kang & Elif Shafak at City Lit in London — these classes are open to all (£32-£49 book online).

She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London, on the literary responses to HIV and AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe (1990 - 2005) and she is the author of Blood on the Page (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), a collection of interviews with the first African writers from Zimbabwe and South Africa to write about HIV and AIDS.

She was the producer of an Arts Council–funded project on African footballers at Chelsea and Arsenal, and the associated anthology of poems, Thinking Outside the Penalty Box, was published by the Poetry Society in 2018.

She worked part-time for 4 years as the Office Manager at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency 2019-2023, and was the Editorial Assistant for 100 Days, 100 Stories: Rwandan Voices on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi (Huza Press, 2024).