Fellow of the Sylt Foundation
South African poet Rachel Zadok is joining the Sylt Foundation's exchange programme Transformation and Identity and taking part in the literary readings "Violent Memories" in Yangon/Myanmar in april 2017.

In 2015 Rachel Zadok and Luxemburg writer and Cologne/Germany resident Guy Helminger were the first Rhine-South Africa-Fellows in the exchange programme of the Sylt Foundation and stimmen Afrikas at Allerweltshaus Cologne.

Rachel Zadok was born in Tel Aviv in 1972 and raised in Johannesburg. She has a National Diploma in Fine Arts. In 2001, she escaped a career in advertising to become a writer, which she describes as being a little like running away to join the circus without the safety net.
In 2005, she was a runner-up in the Richard & Judy How to Get Published Competition and her first novel Gem Squash Tokoloshe was published later that year. Gem Squash Tokoloshe was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and longlisted for the IMPAC award. 
In 2011, she launched Short Story Day Africa, an initiative to highlight African short fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Observer, the Jewish Chronicle, the Independentand African Violet, the 2012 Caine Prize Anthology. 

Rachel lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter, and occasionally blogs.