Researcher
Niren Tolsi is a journalist and curator. He is the recipient of the Ruth First Fellowship and the Heinrich Böll Journalism Fellowship. He has won several awards for his journalism including the 2009 South African Journalist of the Year (Feature category) and the 2016 South African Arts Journalist of the Year.
Tolsi is currently interested in transitioning investigative journalism and archival research into new multi-media spaces including installations, interventions, exhibitions, public engagement programmes, audio-essays, film and podcasts. He is especially interested in the transformative and reparative effects of art and inclusion on survivors of intergenerational violence and trauma. His major work is the ongoing slow journalism project, After Marikana. In 2022 he directed, produced and co-curated the Marikana, Ten Years On exhibition and public engagement programme at South Africa’s National Arts Festival.
He writes about Constitutional Law and the politics of the judiciary, has covered the rise of Jacob Zuma and the associated political violence within the African National Congress in KwaZulu-Natal, and his professional interests include land (dis)possession and restitution; extractive capitalism; environmental crisis and authoritarianism; social justice; living politics; the arts; jazz music; Test cricket and the politics of food.
Tolsi has been published widely in South Africa and internationally. He has previously worked as Chief Reporter at the Mail & Guardian and was Times Media Group’s Deputy Legal Editor. He was one of the co-founders of The Con, a now defunct literary and long-form magazine produced in Johannesburg from 2014-2017.