Brent Meersman is a well known journalist, critic, columnist and author in South Africa. He is currently co-editor of the groundbreaking news site — groundup.org.za. His first job was as a press photographer in Grahamstown in 1989. His first novel Primary Coloured (Human & Rousseau) was published in 2007, followed by Reports Before Daybreak (Umuzi/Random House) and Five Lives at Noon (Missing Ink, 2013). For 12 years he wrote for the national weekly, the Mail & Guardian.

A compulsive traveller; at last count he’d been to 65 countries and travelled around all the continents, including the Antarctic. Out of these experiences came Homo Odyssey. It was translated into German and published in 2015 by Albino Verlag.

His poetry collection Ophila and the Poet and other poems (Junket Press, 2010) includes poems that have appeared in New Contrast, New Contact, Botsotso, and Green Dragon. Short stories have appeared in Speak My Language (Little Brown, 2015) and What Love Is (Arcadia Books, London, 2011). His first published story was in The Invisible Ghetto (COSAW, 1993). He also wrote the libretto for Credo, an oratorio with music composed by Bongani Ndodana-Breen and performed by the Johannesburg Philharmonic and the Cape Town Philharmonic orchestras.

He has a regular column with This is Africa and is co-editor of GroundUp.org.za. He has written extensively for New Africa Analysis magazine (London), reviewed work for the BBC and the Financial Times, and contributed to the Sunday Independent, Business Day, The Witness, Cape Times, Die Burger, The Weekender, The Wry Republic, Politicsweb, and The M&G Thought Leader.