ABOUT NADIA
Nadia Davids, one of South Africa’s most celebrated, innovative post-Apartheid playwrights, is known for her unique tackling of heavy-hitting political themes with a signature combination of intelligence, nuance, warmth and humour. Her plays, focusing variously on womanhood, Islamophobia, migration, racism, memory and childhood, offer women performers roles of true depth, and to speak powerfully - and intimately - to diverse audiences.
Raised in a large extended family in Cape Town’s centuries-old Muslim community in the final years of Apartheid rule, much of her work is rooted in that landscape.
You can read more about Nadia’s creative and political approach to telling those histories of race, time and collective inheritances in Africa is a Country.
Writing
Nadia’s theatre works, At Her Feet, Cissie, What Remains and Hold Still have been staged throughout Southern Africa and Europe, and have been nominated, cumulatively, for sixteen Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards. She has twice won Best New South African Play and in 2022 was awarded the Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama.
Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for the Pan-African Etisalat Prize for Literature and her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, the Georgia Review and Zyzzyva Magazine. She is an NYC’s Women’s Project playwright alum and has held writing residencies at Art Omi, Hedgebrook, and was a 2023 Aspen Writer in Residency.
Her short story ‘Bridling’ won the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing.
Davids’ new novel CAPE FEVER, (publishers: UK: Scribner US: Simon & Schuster) will be out in Winter 2026.
Nadia lives in Los Angeles.
You can read about more about Nadia’s academic work and her activism here: