Rob Macdonald

Rob Macdonald is an independent consultant and coach. He holds an MPhil (Management Studies) from Oxford University and is a former Director of the MBA Programme at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town. Rob is currently co-organiser of the annual Humans Under Management South Africa conference, editorial adviser to Blue Chip Journal, and a sought-after speaker and writer. He is also a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) and a qualified coach and counsellor.

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Judy McComb

Growing up in a Karoo farming community, Judy enjoyed wide-open spaces and unhurried time that fostered a love of reading and the outdoors. Her passion for literature and history lead her to pursue a career in teaching. After teaching high school History and Mathematics for some years, she entered full-time study again, pursuing a course centred on worldviews, theology, and apologetics.

While working full-time for the church, she was involved in the development of her church’s bible school and campus ministry programmes, devotional writing projects and contributing to the church magazine. During this time, she completed an online master’s degree in organisational leadership through Regent University in USA.

For a season, marriage and parenting reframed her focus from full-time paid work to child-rearing. Turning her attention to understanding primary school education, she discovered Charlotte Mason’s life-changing philosophy of education. Her family’s desire to give expression to this philosophy led to a partnership with friends to establish Grace Primary School in Pinelands. She currently serves as the school’s Philosophy Director, which involves teacher training, curriculum development, and nurturing the ethos of the Charlotte Mason approach.

More recently, she participated in a memoir masterclass led by best-selling American author Leslie Leyland-Fields and attended the annual writers’ retreat at Harvester Island off the coast of Alaska. Following this, she has pursued her long-held dream of chronicling the journey of Grace Primary School in a memoir-devotional (soon to be published by Vindigo Press).

Ian Sutherland

Ian, a novelist who straddles the academic, business, and literary worlds, thereby appealing to a broad audience.The first expression of him as an author was to pen ‘cops and robbers’ stories, aged five. As a youngster, he was a fanatical reader, devouring fiction of all kinds. He started writing in earnest to immortalise the stories that had once enthralled his own children―tales he spun aloud each night including a serial known as The Neverending Story. This gained traction with the completion of a memoir.

Ian’s passion for writing intensified and, in 2016, he completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town―resulting in his debut novel, Subversion (previously titled Featherstream) under the supervision of acclaimed South African novelist Professor Etienne van Heerden. Following publication in September 2018, Ian featured in a series of filled-to-capacity book launches and interviews in leading media outlets and literary festivals. Subversion, a page-turning WWII historical drama, has been carried by leading bookstores throughout South Africa, reaching #2 on Exclusive Books’ bestseller list. It was also awarded Best Novel at the 2019 National Independent Publishers Awards

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Don Truter

Don Truter is a poet, writer, musician… a Way. Drawn instinctively to the underdog, the hard-done-by, the gambler, and the gallant, he writes from the cracks where light struggles to enter. Empathizing with what is bruised, broken, or overlooked, his work hums like a lone lightbulb swinging in a dark room—buzzing for exposure, for truth, for the flicker that reveals what others might miss. Influenced as much by the vaulted cadences of William Shakespeare as by the brooding lyricism of Nick Cave, his voice moves between scripture and street corner with words that are timeless but restless, searching for redemption in unlikely places.

Don cut his teeth in Paris, performing the spoken word and scouring the city for remnants of the Beat poets. He has composed scores for film, television, and commercial campaigns, written lyrics for chart-topping, award-winning bands, busked on the streets of New York, taken the stage of the iconic Million Dollar Cowboy Bar in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and performed in concerts and festivals across continents.

As the frontman and writer behind the Cape Town folk and talking-blues project Taleswapper, Don developed a style that is part pub poetry, part folk, part blues. With songs that can tear the soul from you, his band has performed in pubs, clubs and blues joints from Cape Town to New York City.

Also, a lifelong sportsman and coach, Don understands rhythm not only in verse but in breath—in the pool, on the field, on the pitch. To him, craft is psychological, physical, metaphysical. Discipline is creative. To be a man of the world, you must first be a man in the world. He stands as proof that weathered is not wounded—it is seasoned. He is not broken; he is becoming—the bird singing while the dawn is still dark.

His debut poetry collection (soon to be published by Vindigo Press) is a gathering of pieces that have lived in notebooks, in the air of live performances, and in the slow brew of years. It is an invitation to sit still for a while, and to listen.