Athol Williams

Athol Williams (born 20 June 1970) is an award-winning South African poet and social philosopher. From 2009 to 2014, Williams published his poetry under the pseudonym AE Ballakisten.

Williams was born in Lansdowne, Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa's complex racial policies under apartheid classified Williams as Coloured given the racial mix of his parents. He grew up in Mitchells Plain, the coloured township established under apartheid. His experience of apartheid features prominently in his poetry.

He earned degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand,MIT Sloan School of Management, London Business School,Harvard University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he focused on political thought and public policy. It was at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 1991, that he published his first poem, "New South Africa", in the student publication Wits Student. The poem captured the newfound optimism associated with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders in 1990.

Williams "deals in money and metaphor" - he has worked in business around the world, experiences which further shaped his writing. His social activism in South Africa has centred on youth development through education. He is the co-founder of Read to Rise, an NGO that promotes youth literacy by making appropriate books available to children in poor communities. His volunteering and philanthropy in education earned him a Wits Volunteer Award in 2009 and an Inyathelo Award in 2012.

Williams presented the literature radio show Words Alive on Mix 93.8 FM. He has executive produced two human-rights films, Anna & Modern Day Slavery, which features his poem "Steel Cage", and A Shot at the Big Time.

Williams tackles the global issues of conflict, fear and war through the art of poetry. His poetry has strong social and political messages, and is centrally concerned with visions of alternative social and political arrangements. In this way, he rejects Plato's dismissal of poetry as a source of inspiration for political and philosophical thought; he finds poetry to be a rich source because "here we can find uncensored possibility. The possibility of rich human existence is not found in avoiding each other but in finding ways to journey freely together – to co-exist in our differences, not always seek to reconcile them. But to do this we need a sense of who we are, in time and space, and the consciousness, that we are on this journey together."

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