Barbara Ludman, an American journalist, arrived in Johannesburg in April 1976 and started working at The Star only weeks before the Soweto Uprising began. She turned much of what she saw into the award-winning young adult novel, The Day of the Kugel, and subsequently divided her time between reporting and writing books – fiction and non-fiction, and short stories. She was an early member of The Weekly Mail team, now the Mail & Guardian, where she spent seventeen years in a variety of jobs and co-edited several editions of the M&G’s A-Z of SA Politics. She was honoured with the Vodacom Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in coaching and mentoring young journalists, which she continues to do in her current work with the start-up Scrolla.Africa.