Stuart Payne is a poet and writer, born and based in Cape Town, South Africa, having spent part of his early childhood in Auckland, New Zealand. Volunteering to write obituaries and do research at Stanzas, a South African poetry magazine, he hopes to play a role in protecting South Africa’s literary heritage and developing its future. He was previously a committee member of the poetry hosts Off the Wall.

He studied English at the University of Cape Town, later taking French at the Alliance française du Cap and working in animal rescue. His metrical, often rhyming style uses traditional poetic forms, echoing patterns found in popular music. For Stuart, poetry pulses like a heartbeat — flexible, musical, and deeply human.

As a published author, Stuart released his debut collection, Voices from Another Room, in 2018 through Douglas Reid Skinner’s Crane River Press (distributed by uHlanga). The book gathered poems written from ages 19 to 42.

His second collection, The Sun, the Moon & Ripe Cucumbers, was published in late 2025, also by Crane River. It took its title came from an ancient fragment by the Greek poet Praxilla, in which Adonis reflects on the everyday pleasures of life from the underworld.

Exploring themes of mortality, love, time, and human and animal consciousness, these works helped define Stuart Payne’s poetry as contemplative and formally engaging.

Stuart was the winner of the 2022 National Poetry Prize, presented by New Contrast magazine and Bruce Jack Wines, for his poem “Words for Dia!kwain.” The piece evoked the fading memory of the first cultures to inhabit Southern Africa. In 2019, Stuart Payne was the writer of two poems commissioned by the AVBOB Poetry Competition.

Explore more of Stuart Payne’s poetry here.