Bianca Marais Books in Order

Bianca Marais was born in Johannesburg in 1976 and grew up in apartheid-era South Africa. She later made Toronto home, but South Africa's landscapes, history, and social divisions remain central to much of her fiction.

Her childhood included a close relationship with Eunice, the Black woman who worked for Marais's family. Eunice had left her own children in the Transkei to earn a living in Johannesburg, a reality that helped Marais see the human cost of apartheid beyond the insulated Afrikaner world around her.

That relationship became an emotional starting point for her first novel.

Before publishing fiction, Marais founded a corporate training company. She also volunteered with Cotlands, helping Soweto care workers support children orphaned by HIV/AIDS and their caregivers. Those experiences deepened her interest in stories about family, care, race, and the choices people make when systems around them fail.

Her path to publication was a long one. After two manuscripts failed to find an agent, she enrolled in the creative writing certificate program at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies and wrote a third novel. It found an agent, then received fifty publisher rejections. Marais revised it heavily, cutting about 60,000 words, and kept going until one publisher said yes.

She stayed with it.

That novel became Hum If You Don't Know the Words, a 2017 story set around the Soweto Uprising. It follows Robin, a white child grieving her parents, and Beauty, a Xhosa woman searching for her missing daughter. Their uneasy, growing bond gives the novel its heart, while the wider world makes every act of trust complicated.

Her next novel, If You Want to Make God Laugh, moves into post-apartheid South Africa and brings together three women whose lives change after an abandoned baby is found. Both books will suit readers who want character-led stories with family secrets, moral pressure, dark humor, and a strong sense of place.

Marais has also had fun changing lanes. The Witches of Moonshyne Manor is a contemporary fantasy about elderly witches fighting to save their home, while the audio original The Prynne Viper imagines a future courtroom where a pregnancy is put on trial. In A Most Puzzling Murder, she turns to an interactive mystery full of ciphers, choices, and puzzles for the reader to solve alongside its young investigator.

Outside her novels, Marais taught creative writing at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies and received an Excellence in Teaching Award. She is also the co-host of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, a podcast for emerging writers, and has supported the Eunice Ngogodo Own Voices Initiative for young Black women in Africa.

She lives in Toronto, and her work keeps returning to difficult questions with warmth, curiosity, and room for hope.