Harold (Harry) Kalmer (21 November 1956 – 26 July 2019) was a South African novelist, essayist and playwright both in English and his home language Afrikaans.

From 1980-81 he was conscripted into the SADF and deployed as a lieutenant in Namibia; given the context of Namibia's war for independence, this was a formative period for some of his later creative work; he came to be classified as one of the Tagtigers, an anti-apartheid Afrikaans literary clique[2][3] and was socially connected with Voëlvry, a loose but influential grouping of dissident performers[4] usually characterised as Afrikaners but including a member classified as "coloured" and an English-speaker (albeit a thoroughly bilingual one).

For the rest of the 1980s they lived in Yeoville, which was then a "transgressive space";[5] in the 1990s they moved to neighboring Observatory and had two children, Daniël and Jana.

Also in 1992, Kalmer ventured into new territory, directing his own first cabaret, The secret of my excess, performed by Lynn Joffe.

Kniediep[12] (1999) is another novel; Briewe aan 'n rooi dak[13] (2002) was initially a dramatic monologue, later filmed, broadcast and distributed on DVD.