A’Eysha Kassiem is a South African journalist and editor, who has worked in newsrooms both locally and abroad. She has been the News Editor at both the Cape Times and News24. Kassiem has also served as the Editor of Fin24, SA’s largest business site, as well as the Editor-in-chief of the international publication, PrintWeek, based in Dubai.
A journalist and editor for almost two decades, Kassiem graduated cum laude from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, after having spent a few months on scholarship in the Netherlands. During her career, her work has appeared in the Sunday Times, the Cape Times, the Mail&Guardian, PrintWeek in Dubai, Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin as well as on online platforms News24, Fin24, The Media Online, GroundUp and Transitions Online in Prague. Her work as a foreign correspondent for Transitions Online also appeared in a book, entitled Classroom Struggles: Education reporting and Analysis.
She has also worked as the News Editor at the Cape Times and at News24 as well as Editor of Fin24 and Printweek.
She has written extensively about education in South Africa as well as on high profile cases at South African courts. She has also written on South Africa’s prisons and justice system.
Kassiem has previously served as a guest lecturer in Media Studies at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and presently works as an editor at the City of Cape Town.
Apart from hard news, she has also published a series of travelogues about her adventures in South Africa and various parts of the world. These anecdotes appeared in the travel supplement, Escape Times, and detail some of her experiences in Zimbabwe, Zanzibar, Tanzania and Switzerland.
She has also travelled to the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Mauritius, Turkey, UAE, Oman, USA and China.
Inspired by human stories, Kassiem has a deep interest in history, especially South African history, and the many ways that the past and the present collide. As the great granddaughter of a farmworker, the granddaughter of tailors and seamstresses and the daughter of teachers, she has always sought to understand the impact of the past on the lives of individuals. This is one of the themes that is explored in her debut novel, Suitcase of Memory. The novel, written in part during her first ever trip abroad in the Netherlands, has been 15 years in the making. The novel is available at all good bookstores nationwide.
Kassiem is presently working on her next novel, which she hopes will be completed at the end of 2021. At the same time, she is a second year Master’s student in Journalism at Stellenbosch University.
She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter.
