Janet van Eeden is a freelance journalist, playwright, script writer, producer and occasional poet. She writes regular features for the Pietermaritzburg based The Witness and The Weekend Witness, Screen Africa and many national print media including The Sunday Independent, as well as a few British magazines, including Scriptwriter UK. Van Eeden has written ten screenplays. Her latest screenplay, White Lion, has just completed filming in Gauteng. A rough cut of this film went to Cannes 2006. She is also writing the script for an epic feature film Skeleton Coast for Cape Town producers, and is currently producing her own film, A Shot at the Big Time, which is in development with funding from the National Film and Video Foundation.

She has written numerous stage plays and has produced five of them (and directed two) and taken them to the Grahamstown Arts Festival with funding from the National Arts Council each time. Her third play in her Savage trilogy, The Savage Sisters, premiered in Grahamstown in July 2005, and A Matter of Time, premiered in Grahamstown in 2006, again with funding from the National Arts Council and was directed by Ian Roberts. She entered a new play, In-Gene-Uity, into the Pansa Playwriting Competition for 2007. Her play Expletive Deleted was selected for the main festival for MUSHO 2007 at The Kwasuka Theatre in Durban. Expletive Deleted, also directed by Ian Roberts, toured in 2007.

Van Eeden has her Masters in English (cum laude) and lectures in Scriptwriting at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal where two of her students over the past two years have received the prestigious M-Net EDiT award. She also gives Scriptwriting workshops around the country.

Launching soon: White LION. For more information on the film go to www.whitelionthemovie.com