Beverley Naidoo is a popular South African children's author who has written a number of award-winning novels, mainly about life in South Africa, where she spent her childhood. She graduated from the University of York with a BA in Education in 1968.
Naidoo won the Josette Frank Award twice — in 1986 for Journey to Jo'burg and in 1997 for No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa. She was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 2000 for The Other Side of Truth. the other side of truth is a story about political corruption and how that affects the lives of the kids of a out spoken writer.
Beverley Naidoo was born in South Africa on 21 May 1943 and grew up under apartheid. As a student, she began to question the apartheid regime and was later arrested for her actions as part of the resistance movement in South Africa. In 1965 she came to England and married another South African exile; they have two children.
Journey to Jo'burg, Chain of Fire and Out of Bounds are set in South Africa under apartheid, while No Turning Back concerns the experiences of a boy trying to survive on the streets of Johannesburg in the immediate post-apartheid years. The Other Side of Truth and its sequel, Web of Lies, deal with the experiences of Nigerian political asylum seekers in England. Her 2007 novel Burn My Heart has an imagined point of reference in the boyhood in Kenya of a second cousin, Neil Aggett, being set in the 1950s during the Mau Mau uprising.
Beverley Naidoo has also written several picture books, featuring children from Botswana and England. In 2004, she wrote the picture book Baba's Gift, set in contemporary South Africa, with her daughter, Maya Naidoo. In The Great Tug of War and Other Stories she retells African folktales, the precursors of the Brer Rabbit tales."I really believe that everyone should have rights, including the poor and unfortunate."