Pauline Jansen Van Rensburg
Pauline Jansen Van Rensburg is a South African writer, lecturer, and workshop designer based in Munich, Germany.
Her fiction blends realism with elements of the fantastic to grapple with themes of resistance, exile, and transformation. She is currently working on a novel set in 1960s apartheid South Africa, which reimagines the Karoo desert as a phantasmagorical literary space: haunted by its socio-political legacies, animated by speculative mythologies, and shaped by the struggle for freedom and belonging.
Her academic path began in France, where she earned a BA in French Literature and an MA in Applied Foreign Languages / International Relations. After working as a translator and interprète de liaison, she founded a Munich-based corporate training company that built bridges across languages and cultures, establishing herself as an intercultural mediator.
Shifting from translating words to conjuring worlds, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in the UK, where she brought her literary, linguistic, and intercultural background into dialogue with her creative practice.
For over a decade, Pauline has taught Rhetoric and Composition at the Technical University of Munich, launching the first creative writing courses in English and co-creating a STEM-themed short story competition that fuses science and storytelling, inviting students from around the world to experiment with speculative writing.
She believes creative writing should be a playground and a meeting place as much as it is a practice. Guided by this ethos, her teaching aims to open spaces for interdisciplinary inquiry, imaginative experimentation, and intercultural dialogue where writers can take risks, cross borders, and imagine other worlds.
At Pa Gya! 2025, she will lead Estranging the Ordinary: Speculative Technologies – Reprogramming the Social Machine, an interactive speculative fiction workshop blending theory, play, and creative practice, inviting participants to rewire the everyday and dream of new futures.