About Anli Serfontein

Anli Serfontein is a South African freelance writer, journalist and filmmaker, now based in Berlin and Johannesburg.




Anli has broad-ranging experience working in the international media as a television producer, documentary filmmaker and journalist and commentator 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.


Berlin (1985)

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 and the Church-State conflict. 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 World War. In the last few years Anli specialised on inter-cultural, inter-religious and ecumenical issues.

Interviewing advisors of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Kazakhstan (2009)

For 17 years Germany's oldest city, Trier on the Moselle was her home. Her first book "From Rock to Kraut" was published in March 2008 and humourously relates her story of  settling in Germany and the problems she encountered along the way. It received wide-spread acclaim.



Anli Serfontein at the Roman Baths in Trier, the oldest city in Germany (c)Daniel Schieben 2008


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.


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


Penguin Prize for Non-Fiction Awards ceremony September 2010, Johannesburg






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www.twitter.com/anliserfontein