Wendy Woodward

Wendy Woodward is Professor Emerita in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, where her research and publications focused on Postcolonialism and Human-Animal Studies.

She published The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (2008) as well as numerous articles locally and internationally. She co-edited Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, Animals and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Recently her series of poems constituted a chapter in a celebratory volume for a high Tibetan Buddhist lama, Gyaltsab Rinpoche (Gyaltsab Book Trust, 2024; Wisdom, 2025). Her poetry has appeared in the anthologies and journals: Stanzas, English Academy Review, New Contrast, Illuminations, New Letters, Animal Studies Journal, and The Quilled Ink Review, published in South Africa, North America and Australia. She has read her poetry at Off the Wall, The Red Wheelbarrow Collective, and at the McGregor Poetry Festival.  

Wendy has published four volumes of poetry:

• Threshold (Quilled Ink Press, 2026)

• A Saving Bannister (Modjadji, 2015)

• Love, Hades and Other Animals (Protea, 2008)

• Séance for the Body (Snailpress, 1994)

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Having retired from UWC in 2015, she now follows her passion for sharing the profound delights of poetry. She is editing a collection of Zen-inspired poetry, mentors individual poets working towards publication, facilitates creative writing workshops at The Grail Writers’ Retreat in Kleinmond and in ongoing groups in Cape Town. During the COVID lockdown, she offered online Poetry Salons on contemporary poetry.

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Wendy lives in Cape Town with a small black dog and not too far from her daughter, and a palomino horse. Poetry permeates her life and sustains it on this precarious, beloved planet. For her, writing poetry is acting in community with other voices, be they human or more than human.