[1] Jo-Anne Richards grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and was educated at Collegiate Girls' high school.

She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was a lecturer in journalism for 15 years.

Richards worked full-time for four South African newspapers – The Star, the Sunday Express, the Cape Times and Evening Post – reporting, sub-editing and news-editing.

Richards rose to prominence with her first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996), which became a bestseller in her native country and was short-listed for the M-Net Book Prize and nominated for the Impac International Dublin Literary Award.

Richards wrote on concepts such as striving and slacking in a dead book proposal in the mid 1990s.