In the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, an extended essay based on her assertion that women of the time needed a safe, private space if they were to be able to write. Hers was a feminist argument, of course, a generation and a continent away from the experience of the young Joe Bvumburai – but the principle is pretty much the same. Growing up in the suburbs of Lusaka,...

It’s always a bit of a worry in the back of my mind, ahead of talking to people for this magazine, whether they’ll talk back. The monosyllabic interviewee is the journalist’s worst nightmare. Now, I hasten to add that there really haven’t been many of these as entrepreneurs tend to have the gift of the gab, but I knew I was on solid ground with voiceover artist Liz Drury – a woman who talks for...

You won’t find her listed in the credits, but Juliet O’Sullivan is the woman behind the lean looks of an array of superstar actors in a list of Hollywood blockbusters. And some productions that didn’t quite make it. “It started with a TV-on-demand series, Da Vinci’s Demons,” she said. “Because our work was a success I started to get some bigger movies.” The movie commissions may have dried up...

When Karl Douglas opened Beverley Travel at the beginning of 2020, little did he know that Covid-19 was going to devastate the industry within a matter of weeks. That being the case, it was something of a silly question to ask whether he would have opened had he known what was around the corner, but I asked him to indulge me and wave the magic wand of hindsight nevertheless. “I would have...

A decade or more ago, it looked like the writing was on the wall for the printed book. Amazon’s Kindle was the next big thing in the inexorable march towards digital that had done for so many other traditional formats across other genres. But it didn’t happen. It turns out that tech junkies – even millennial ones – need a screen break from time to time. The tactile thrill of holding a book,...