Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes is a Cape Town novelist, TV scriptwriter, comics writer, documentary maker and occasional journalist.
She won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award for her novel Zoo City, set in a fantastical Johannesburg where guilt manifests as spirit animal familiars and dark things lurk beneath the surface of the pop music industry.
She helped create South Africa’s first half hour animated TV show, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, a mash-up of African magic and giant robots, working as head writer with Sam Wilson, Sarah Lotz and Greig Cameron over 104 episodes. She’s also written for Disney UK’s Florrie’s Dragons and Millimages’ Mouk.
She got her comics break at WorldCon in 2009 when Fables’ Bill Willingham came along to a reading she was doing from her debut novel, Moxyland, and insisted that she pitch a storyline for Rapunzel to his editor at Vertigo, Shelly Bond.
Her audition script was All The Pretty Ponies, a nine pager illustrated by Inaki Miranda about a mind-ride experience gone wrong, which appeared in Vertigo’s Strange Adventure’s 1 in 2011.
She’s currently writing a Rapunzel mini-series for the Fables off-shoot, Fairest with Inaki Miranda and Eva de la Cruz on colouring (artwork below).

Click to see more preview artwork.

External Links:

Novels:
Zoo City (2010)
Moxyland (2008)

Comics:
All The Pretty Ponies, Strange Adventures, #1 Vertigo, 2011
Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom (Fables spin-off), Vertigo, September 2012

TV/Film:
Glitterboys & Ganglands (Director, documentary with SeaMonster and Okuhle 2011)
Mouk (contract writer Millimages 2011)
Florrie’s Dragons (contract writer, Wish Films for Disney UK, 2011)
Z-News Pilot (Writer, Both Worlds & Clockwork Zoo 2010)
The South African Story with Desmond Tutu (writer Clockwork Zoo 2011)
URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika (Head writer 2006-2009 SABC3)

Awards:

• Zoo City won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award and the 2010 Kitschies Red Tentacle. It’s been short-listed for the World Fantasy Award,  Best Novel for the British Science Fiction Association awards, the University of Johannesburg Prize and the M-Net Literary Awards and long-listed for the Dublin IMPACC Award and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.
• Moxyland was long-listed for the Sunday Times prize 2009
• Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past was long-listed for the Alan Paton award 2006
• Named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans and featured in the M&G’s Book of Women
• BookSA Author of the Year 2010

External Links:
Website: www.laurenbeukes.com
Twitter: @laurenbeukes
Blog: http://laurenbeukes.bookslive.co.za/blog
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2310410/

News:
Willingham Picks The Fairest for Fables Spin-Off  – Comic Book Resources
DC Blog: Shelly Bong on Fairest
Strange Adventures Q&A on the DC Blog

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