About Joanne Hichens

Joanne Hichens lives in Muizenberg with her husband and three children. With degrees in art and psychology, Joanne worked as an artist, lecturer and group facilitator at a psychiatric clinic before completing a Master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Cape Town. Joanne co-authored a crime-thriller Out To Score (Umuzi, 2006, with Mike Nicol), Stained (Ransom, 2008) as part of the Ransom Publishing Cutting Edge series was published in the UK and has been sold to a French market. She edited the first South African collection of crime-thriller fiction in Bad Company, and edited the BED BOOK of short stories for Modjaji Books. She’s written a number of short stories and articles, published in ‘O’ Magazine, Real Simple, Itch and various anthologies, and writes reviews and opinion pieces for the Cape Times newspaper.

Her new novel Divine Justice was published by Mercury, an imprint of Burnet Media, in October 2011.

“Crime-thrillers bring the cruel and the tragic to our attention, and underscore the absurd and fragile nature of life. I’m of the opinion that crime-thriller writing can be as open-ended real life is; somethimes there are loose ends, a messiness exists which can be shown through the writing. I prefer writing the bad guys, which comes easier to me if they’re verging on the psycopathic, or are at least rather over the top. I’ve always had a penchant for bizzarre characters.”