I am a writer drawn to people and places – to the conversations that unfold around kitchen tables, the long silences of wilderness trails, and the way a life keeps reshaping itself when we are paying attention. My work moves between memoir, travel writing, cultural commentary and family story, shaped by a deep curiosity about how we belong to places and to one another.

Before devoting myself fully to writing, I spent more than two decades working as a professional musician and academic across several countries, teaching at universities and schools, performing internationally, designing curricula and publishing scholarly work in journals and at conferences. I hold a Doctorate in the Musical Arts and trained in South Africa, the United States and Germany, and my academic life ranged from ethnomusicological research and conference presentations to founding concert series and developing intercultural teaching programmes. Those years trained me to listen closely – to rhythm, nuance and silence – skills that now underpin how I approach narrative on the page.

Learning has always been a constant thread in my life. Alongside formal academic work, I continue to refine my craft through short courses in copy-editing and social-media strategy completed at the University of Cape Town, language study, and wide-ranging reading and travel, as recorded in KilroeSmith Music CV. I have lived and worked across four continents, and I remain endlessly fascinated by how landscapes, food, music and ordinary daily rituals reveal something essential about the people who inhabit them.

These days, I divide my time between writing, developing new book projects, running a memoir-writing business, and raising my daughter on the South African coast. In my free hours, I organise Bach & 4th Concerts – intimate classical music evenings that bring performers and audiences together in beautiful, unexpected spaces – and I am happiest when planning the next walk, meal or journey that might turn into a story.

On my Substack and here on this site, I publish essays about travel, walking, food as memory, cultural life, reinvention and the small human encounters that quietly shape us. I am currently revising a full-length memoir, developing a second book about my years in Dresden, and writing a children’s series inspired by southern African landscapes and wildlife.

I write with curiosity first – and with gratitude for the many lives, places and teachers that have formed me.