I am Lizza Littlewort. I use a nom-de-plume to reduce confusion with my painting career.
The name is my personal homage and living shrine to Joseph Conrad.
I think he was the greatest storyteller of all time.
MY STORY
Writing: early signs
My first inkling that I was good at this was as a child when I always won spelling contests. Later I won the Francis Brett-Young Prize for the best essay in the Western Cape. I hadn’t even applied. They found me.
Scriptwriting
After school I was determined to be sensible and studied architecture at UCT. It was through fellow architecture student Jonathan Shapiro, aka Zapiro the famed cartoonist, that my next writing lessons came. As two out of four members of an educational media collective, Story Circle, we learned how to create a story arc that could make you cry.
94%
Our stories worked. The Medical Research Council conducted a study on our media. It was the largest study in the Southern Hemisphere to date, and its aim was to measure the effectiveness of health media.
94% retention of all health messages was measured in the target group, who were the most hard-to-reach, marginalised, alienated youth in a heavily divided South Africa. We had reached them without coming across as outsiders, and they took our fictional characters into their hearts and discussed their choices as if they were friends. We received letters of gratitude from young fans in parts of the country we hadn’t even heard of. To us it was like a Mandela Moment in the dawn of the new South Africa.
Literature
Studying literature was like coming home. In the words of Jacques Derrida, “there is nothing outside the text.” Everything we do starts as an idea, and that idea is born in words.
Writing for you
It is this thrilling sense of forging possibility that motivates my writing for you. Every new business is another valiant project to build this country. It’s an honour and privilege to participate in making it work.
