Gérard Rudolf was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in the year Verwoerd was assassinated.

He spent most of his childhood in Cape Town. When he was a boy, he was convinced the world had been monochrome before he was born—all the photographs in the family albums, the old movies on TV, all of it black and white. He spent hours trying to figure out how and when the world changed to colour. He roamed the neighborhood with friends creating strange worlds in empty lots—Cowboys and Indians, Star Wars, Huck Finn. School bored him. He mostly stared out the windows. His head was never where his body was. It still isn’t. His teenage years were spent in Johannesburg.

After school, he joined the military for 2 years because it was compulsory and because his family wasn’t rich enough to send him into exile in order to dodge the dictates of the Apartheid regime. At 18 he did a tour of duty in the Angolan War. After his discharge he resolved never to wear a uniform or take up arms again. (so far, so good) He studied acting, moved to Cape Town and became a successful actor. He loved the collaborative nature of acting, all the oddballs and geniuses, and that no two days were the same.

In 1998 he co-founded a professional acting school in Cape Town because he wanted to give something back to the industry that had saved him from the 9-5. By 2002 he was utterly burnt out. His life was burning down around his ears. He felt as if he were sitting in a deck chair with a cold beer watching everything go up in smoke. He quit acting, got divorced, and moved to the UK where he started writing full-time as a means to orient himself on the map. He moved back to Johannesburg in 2010.

He is not as dark and moody as people think. He blames this misconception on his face.