Janet van Eeden has been a writer most of her life. She wrote her first poem about a Tiger when she was eight. She has earned her living from freelance journalism, script writing and producing for the past thirteen years.

She has written for many print media including The Witness, The Sunday Independent, as well as a few British magazines, including Scriptwriter UKand the websites Litnet and Twelvepoint.com.

Van Eeden has written eleven screenplays and six stage plays to date.

She reviews books regularly for The Witness and Litnet.

She has produced six plays (and directed two) and taken each one to the Grahamstown Arts Festival with funding from the National Arts Council each time. Her new play, In-Gene-Uity, premiered at the Grahamstown Festival in July 2009.

She was a supervising producer on two M-Net EDiT Films, “Smile” (2006) and “Commando” (2007), written by her film writing students, Johann Hyman and Stephen de Villiers, while lecturing at UKZN.

A full-length feature film she co-wrote, White Lion premiered at the Durban International Film Festival in July 2009 and was released internationally in February 2010.

Van Eeden has her Masters in English (cum laude) and lectured part-time in Scriptwriting at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal for two years. She gives Scriptwriting workshops around the country and has given workshops at AFDA Johannesburg, for the Wildlife Film Academy at the Kruger National Park and Entebene Game Park as well as at Wild Talk International Film Festival in 2009.

She received a National Arts Council Grant in 2008 to write the novel The Width of a Thread.

Her stage play A Matter of Time was unanimously declared the winning entry by all three judges of the Olive Schreiner Award 2008.

She is currently producing her own film, A Shot at the Big Time, in co-production with Moviworld, the producers of the Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi.

She also offers an online Scriptwriting Course which has attracted students from as far afield as the DRC and Europe.  

Launched: White LION. For more information on the film go to www.whitelionthemovie.com Click here for news articles and interviews on White Lion