Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic and the author of eleven best-selling novels. She served as Head of School at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and as of December 2019, she took up the post of Dean of Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, New York. She trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 1989–1995, and gained her PhD in Architecture from the University of London in 2007. She has taught at schools in the US, the UK and South Africa. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture and is on the editorial board of ARQ (Cambridge). She has been an on-going contributor to discourses around identity, race, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space and practice for nearly thirty years. She is a regular juror at international competitions and symposia, and is a long-term contributor to BBC World. In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004), a UK-Guardian top forty best-seller, and has since then followed with ten further best-sellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages.