South African writer Kabelo Sello Duiker was BOTD in 1974. Born in Orlando West, Soweto, to a prosperous middle-class family, he was educated at private schools in South Africa, one of only Black pupils in his class during the height of South Africa’s apartheid regime. After attending senior school in England, he returned to South Africa to study copywriting at Rhodes University. Expelled from university for drug abuse, he was institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital. On his release, he wrote his first novel Thirteen Cents, the tale of Black child with blue eyes who experiences gangsterism, the sex trade and alienation due to his appearance. Published in 2000 in the newly-democratic South Africa, it caused a sensation, earning comparisons with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. His next novel, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, about a Black man and former psychiatric patient who works in a gay brothel, was widely read as being autobiographical. Duiker also worked as a copywriter, a screenwriter, and as a commissioning editor for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. He struggled with mental illness throughout his adult life, before committing suicide in 2005, aged 30. His final novel, The Hidden Star, was published posthumously in 2006. The Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award was established in his memory, honouring South African novelists aged 40 or under.