Evert Cilliers

Evert is a writer-performer. He grew up in apartheid South Africa and was raised to be an elite Afrikaner fascist. However, something went terribly wrong in his choice of teenage reading material, and between Darwin, Freud and Bertrand Russell, he ended up rejecting his nation, his religion and his family. When a riot of white cops vs. black protesters sent a teargas canister rolling into the lobby of an ad agency heʼd just started, he thought about emigrating. Then the apartheid regime banned his first play A Very Butch Libido, and he took off for the freedom of America. He continues writing plays, novels, poetry and songs, and attended the OʼNeill Playwrights Conference in 1993 with a play about torture. In advertising, his work on the Absolut Vodka campaign rocketed the brand from nowhere to the #1 import in four years; it's now the longest-running campaign in advertising history. He performed his one-man show How to Cook a Man on three continents. His rock group, the Dingbots, created the rock opera Kidd Radar, available on iTunes and CDBaby.com; their video The Obama Karma Song is on YouTube. A semi-legend on the 1990s slam poet scene, he won the 1997 National Poetry Slam, and starred in the PBS documentary Slammin'. His poetry is anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and collected in Suck My Poem from Lulu.com. He's working on his first musical, Cinderella and the Empire of Chocolate. Email: evertcilliers [at] yahoo.com