Colette Victor
Agent: Jo BellColette Victor now lives in Belgium after being born in South Africa. She has written five novels, including a YA novel, Head Over Heart, which was shortlisted for the Mslexia Children’s Novel Competition, and an adult novel that was one of three finalists for the 2013 Dundee International Book Prize. Head Over Heart was published by Chicken House in 2014.
Colette’s first adult fiction deal was with Cargo Publishing and her debut novel What to do with Lobsters in a place like Klippiesfontein was published in May 2015.
After finishing secondary school and a year of tertiary education in South Africa, Colette took a year’s sabbatical tour around Europe and ended up working as an au pair in Belgium for a single father of three young children. Twenty years on and this single father is her husband. His three young children are now twenty-somethings and they have two daughters together and two foster children: a 19-year-old son from South Africa and a three-year-old Belgian daughter. Initially, Colette and her husband lived in South Africa with their five children before returning to Belgium twelve years ago, where Colette went to teacher training college. She then became a community worker in one of the disadvantaged ex-mining communities in Belgium and works with children, youth, ex-detainees, mothers and senior citizens from Belgium, as well as foreign backgrounds. She writes in her spare time.