Sarah Isaacs is a writer and visual storyteller based in Cape Town, South Africa. After graduating from a psychology degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2009, Sarah shifted her professional focus to portrait and documentary photography, creating safe spaces for South African women to share their everyday struggles. Boosted by the voices of those women she photographed, she was able to explore her own relationship to issues of identity, gender-based violence and the impact of infertility on a woman’s sense of self. In 2018 she invited victims of GBV to be photographed as a way of sharing their stories of sexual trauma and turned the lessons she learnt from that portrait series into a 2019 TEDx talk, which centred on survivor shame and its implications for the expression of vulnerability. Sarah was accepted into UCT’s Creative Writing MA program in 2020 and completed her first novel, Glass Tower, in 2021. It went on to win The Island Prize for debut fiction from Africa in 2022 and has just been published by Holland House in the UK.
