Stuart Payne is a poet and writer, born and based in Cape Town, South Africa, having spent part of his early childhood in Auckland, New Zealand. As the current chairperson of the  Off the Wall, Cape Town’s oldest running poetry group, Stuart hopes to play a role in nurturing South African poetry. He also volunteers for Obituaries and Research at Stanzas, a leading South African poetry magazine.

He studied English at the University of Cape Town, later taking French at the Alliance française du Cap and working in animal rescue. His metrical, often rhyming style blends traditional poetic forms with modern rhythms, echoing patterns found in popular music. For Stuart, poetry pulses like a heartbeat — flexible, musical, and deeply human.

As a published author, Stuart released his debut collection, Voices from Another Room, in 2018 through Douglas Reid Skinner’s Crane River Press (distributed by uHlanga). The book gathers poems written from ages 19 to 42, exploring themes of mortality, love, time, and human-animal consciousness. This work helped define Stuart Payne’s poetry as introspective and formally engaging.

His second collection, The Sun, the Moon & Ripe Cucumbers, is planned for release in late 2025. Its title comes from an ancient fragment by the Greek poet Praxilla, in which Adonis reflects on the everyday pleasures of life from the underworld.

Stuart was the winner of the 2022 National Poetry Prize, presented by New Contrast magazine and Bruce Jack Wines, for his poem “Words for Dia!kwain.” The piece explored the fading memory of the first cultures to inhabit Southern Africa. In 2019, Stuart Payne the writer was also commissioned by AVBOB to produce two original poems.

Explore more of Stuart Payne’s poetry here and follow his latest updates via Off the Wall and Stanzas Magazine.