Profile
Chase Rhys is a novelist, columnist, playwright, and screenwriter based in South Africa. Chase writes in Kaaps (or Afrikaaps)—Afrikaans as spoken by people of colour in South Africa, more specifically Cape Town (Kaapstad). People who speak the language are not represented or are typically relentlessly misrepresented, and by writing about their community, in the language that they speak, Chase is pioneering a new reading culture in people whose authentic stories have been erased and ignored in literature. Chase's debut novel, “Kinnes”, won the 2019 K. Sello Duiker Prize at the South African Literary Awards and the kykNET-Rapport Prize. Their second book, “Misfit”, is a compilation of new and reworked stories from their biweekly column in Rapport newspaper and Netwerk24. Set on the Cape Flats in South Africa, the columns are written from Chase's perspective as an autistic, queer, post-binary misfit. Chase was also on the first all-Kaaps television writing team to create the 13-part dramatic mini-series, “Skemerdans”, for Showmax and kykNET.
