Lauri K.

I am an internationally award-winning, professional writer who has been earning my living from writing for the past nearly 20 years. I'm efficient, never miss a deadline, and always meet or surpass clients' expectations. I have more than thirty published works of fiction in my own name with established publishers such as Penguin-Random House, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press. My books are for readers from the early reading stages to adults, so I have wide and varied experience. I was born in the USA, but have lived in Botswana for the last thirty years. Besides being a native English speaker, I have wide experience in American English and British English, which we use in Botswana. I have won or been short-listed for numerous writing awards, including: The Bessie Head Literary Prize, The Caine Prize, The Golden Baobab Prize (an African prize for children's' writing, which I have won twice), the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, to only mention a few. I was Botswana's Creative Writer of the Year in 2007. My historical novel, The Scattering (Penguin 2016) won Best International Fiction Book at the 2017 Sharjah International Book Fair in the UAE. The North American rights for this book have now been bought by Waveland Press (USA). My short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies around the world. My writing has been translated into Slovakian, French, Swedish, and soon into Icelandic. I have written numerous radio scripts, as well as two thirteen-part television dramas for Botswana Television. I regularly write computer story games too. Besides my creative writing, I wrote a weekly column for Botswana's only private national daily newspaper, Mmegi, for many years and have, in the past, written a column for The New Internationalist (UK). My freelance non-fiction articles have appeared in magazines in Canada, UK, Australia, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and USA, only to mention a few.