Pat Williams

Pat Williams (19*-) is an award-winning poet, writer, journalist, script-writer, broadcaster and psychotherapist.

Beginning her working life at sixteen, she joined the Cape Times at the age of 18, before moving to the Sunday Times, where she wrote specialized articles on a wide range of subjects under her own byline. For more than a year she was the newspaper’s film and theatre critic. Her verses appeared in most of the major newspapers of the country.

In 1959 she joined the production team for the jazz opera King Kong as lyricist.

Pat later moved to London where she worked for decades, and in recent years has been resident on the Isle of Arran.

Since moving to the UK she has founded and was for ten years the director of the London College of Storytellers (formed to help kick-start the British storytelling revival), and gives popular workshops and seminars on metaphor and therapeutic storytelling in Britain and elsewhere. She is the co-author of a best-selling encyclopedia of human beliefs and currently writes a regular thought-provoking column for Human Givens: promoting emotional health and clear thinking, in which she explores a wide range of new ideas and information relating to human behaviour and experience. She is a member of the Education Board of the European Therapy Studies Institute (ETSI), for whom she has also produced several informative CDs.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Besides working as the film and theatre critic for the Sunday Times, she was part of the team that developed the jazz opera King Kong, writing the lyrics for the famous 1959 production by Union Artists.

In 2017 published the book King Kong: Our Knot of Time and Music (Jonathan Ball Publishers), her personal memoir of the original production of the musical and a behind-the-scenes account of the legendary South African musical and its ongoing legacy.