[2] Pumla Dineo Gqola is also the recipient of the German Falling Walls Foundation 2023 Breakthrough Award in Humanities and Social Sciences [3] and the CANEX Prize for Publishing in Africa.

[7][10] In 2019, she was appointed to the Department of Higher Education Ministerial Task Team responsible for advising on gender-based violence in South African universities.

[7] She was an inaugural Chair of Judges of Etisalat Prize for Literature (alongside Billy Kahora, Dele Olojede, Ellah Wakatama, Kole Omotoso and Margaret Busby), launched in 2013 to celebrate first-time African writers of published books of fiction.

She has also published a collection of essays, Reflecting Rogue: Inside the Mind of a Feminist (2018), which was favourably received[19][20][21] and longlisted for the 2018 Alan Paton Award.

[22] In Rape (2015), written for public audiences, Gqola examines the history, workings, and social functions of sexual violence in South Africa.

[35] Female Fear Factory received positive reviews,[36][37][38] with fellow academic Jamie Martin labelling it a "timely and critical contribution" to South African feminist thinking.