JENNY HOBBS is a novelist and freelance journalist who lives in Franschhoek in the Western Cape, South Africa.  She reviewed books for many years and has also written for radio and worked on TV book programmes as organiser, scriptwriter, presenter and interviewer.

She was part of the team that created the first Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2007 and is now the FLF Director. She was born in Durban, schooled in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and studied for a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English and Geography at the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg).

After university, she worked as a supply teacher in London before marrying Ron Hobbs and settling on a smallholding near Johannesburg with their family, later moving closer to the city.  She relocated to the Cape in 2006.  

Jenny’s work has been published in most South African newspapers and magazines.  For seven years it included the first regular column in South African English, starring Blossom Broadbeam, the subject of her first book of collected columns, Darling Blossom (Don Nelson, 1979).

From 1978 to 1982 she was Features Editor on Thandi magazine, then part of Bona, and her experiences during those years led to her second book, an illustrated first aid manual in basic English called First Aid for the Family (Southern Book Publishers, in association with the South African Red Cross, 1987).

Jenny’s short stories have been published in Contrast, New South African Writing, various anthologies of South African writing and overseas, and broadcast by the SABC and the BBC, though she now concentrates on full-length fiction.

She is the author of three adult novels, a novel for teenagers and a collection of quotes about writers and writing. 

Her first eight books are now out of print, but a fourth adult novel, Kitchen Boy, will be published in March 2011. She has attended Time of the Writer in Durban and the Edinburgh International Book Fair. Helping to promote reading in South Africa has been one of her decades-long concerns. 

She was involved in a number of reading initiatives, gave speeches to schools and book gatherings, and focuses now on the efforts of the Franschhoek Literary Festival and its FLF Library Fund to create a vibrant reading culture in the Western Cape and build a new community library.