Barbara Townsend has had a lifelong love of reading and writing stories. She has been a librarian, a teacher to people from age three to seventy years, a textbook writer, and a facilitator of creative writing for children, farmworkers and students from Gabon. Her aim in this facilitation work, and in her subsequent writing, is to give a voice to people who might otherwise be forgotten and to tell the lesser-known histories of South Africa. Ida’s Line and Out of Mind – a story of Robben Island, her first two novels are about such histories. Her third novel is a childhood memoir –The Colour of Flying – released in August 2025.
Barbara, and her husband, Mark, live in the peaceful Overberg region of the Western Cape, South Africa.
