Biography of Craig Higginson

Craig Higginson is a South African novelist and playwright.

Higginson was born in Zimbabwe in 1971 and fled with his family to Johannesburg during the Rhodesian Bush War. He went to boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal, and then attended the University of Witwatersrand. There he initially studied fine art but changed to English and European literature. For a time he worked as an assistant to the director Barnet Simon at the Market Theatre, but after Simon’s death, Higginson moved to England.

Higginson stayed in England for ten years, working at the Young Vic Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was also a theatre critic for Time Out. He published his first novel, Embodied Laughter, in 1998, and then adapted it as Laughter in the Dark for the stage.

Higginson returned to South Africa in 2004. He taught at the University of Witwatersrand and was the Literary Manager of Market Theatre. His other novels include The Landscape Painter (2011), Last Summer (2010), and The White Room (2018), and his other plays include Ten Bush (2008), The Girl in the Yellow Dress (2010), and The Imagined Land (2015). He also writes for South African television.

His work has been nominated for and won many awards, including the Naledi Award for Best South African Play (multiple nominations, with The Girl in the Yellow Dress winning), and the UJ Award Main Prize for South African Literature in English (Landscape and Dream House winning).

He and his wife, actress Leila Henriques, live in Johannesburg.


Study Guides on Works by Craig Higginson

The Dream House is one of South African novelist and playwright Craig Higginson's most popular novels. Published in 2015, it was adapted from a play of his entitled The Dream of the Dog (2010).

Higginson began writing the outline of a novel in...