Sindiswa Busuku is a creative writer and a lecturer in the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. She grew up in Durban. Having been awarded a doctoral scholarship by the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, she is currently reading for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. Her doctoral dissertation, And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, is an experimental work of poetic fiction that thinks through ideas of Black fugitivity, Black wandering, migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and the crisis of Black histories and futurities.
She has published various poems in local and international poetry journals. In 2016, she published her debut collection titled Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso) – a cross-genre assemblage of photographs, prose and poetry experimenting with imagination, memory and documentation. She was awarded second place for the 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. Her work was shortlisted for the 2016 Gerald Kraak Award for African Writers and Artists, the 2016 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English, and longlisted for the 2018 Humanities and Social Sciences Award. In addition, Loud and Yellow Laughter is the winner of the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry.
Her teaching and research blur creative and critical methods and writing genres to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical. Her current research focuses on ideas concerned with hybrid genres, the speculative imagination, archives, critical fabulations, and creative writing.