About Anli Serfontein

Anli Serfontein is a South African freelance writer and journalist, and sometime lecturer  living in Germany's oldest city, Trier on the Moselle.

She has broad-ranging experience working in the international media as a television producer, documentary filmmaker, journalist and researcher.  In the past three decades, she has worked for all the big names in television, including Reuters and the BBC. Anli started her journalistic career in The Netherlands, where she studied documentary film-making at IKON Television in the early Eighties before returning to South Africa in 1986.

After working as a journalist and television producer in southern Africa during the heady late Eighties and early Nineties, covering States of Emergencies, township unrest, the road to independence in Namibia, Mandela's release and the multi-party talks in South Africa, she returned to Europe and settled in Germany in 1995.

For many years she was an all-rounder  covering  everything from culture to sport to politics to economics in southern Africa. In Germany, she worked as a researcher for the BBC 's Brian Hanrahan, delving into the past for many of the stories he did from Germany on the Fall of the Wall  and the Second Wolrd War. In the last few years Anli specialised on inter-cultural, inter-religious and ecumenical issues.

Her first book "From Rock to Kraut" was published in March 2008. The book humourously relates her story of  settling in Germany and the problems she encountered along the way. It received wide-spread acclaim.

In September 2008 the book was selected Book of the Month by veteran publisher Vito von Eichborn and was published in a second edition in Germany. It is still in English, but is now called: Basteln, Wandern and Putzen: From South Africa to Trier - Living among the Krauts.

She continues to write. In June 2010 her second book with the working title "Traitor's Daughter" was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing.

As a writer there are another two unpublished manuscripts lying in her bottom drawer. As a freelance journalist she continues to do research for  quality television programmes, and write articles for whoever is happy to pay her for her writing. Futhermore she lectures Business English Presentations at Universities and also has public and press relations experience.

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