Sarah Fletcher writes what she knows. Over the course of her years exploring the world and herself, she has learned that the art of knowing lives both within and outside of us. We know in our bodies, our minds and our spirits, but we also come to know through and within our lived experiences of the outside world and with others. In the art of knowing, there is space for intellect and emotion, information and intuition, science and wisdom, study and play.

Born and raised in sunny South Africa, Sarah developed an insatiable curiosity for the world at a young age. As a teenager, her cupboard doors were covered in a collage of poor-quality Google images of cities and places she would one day visit. Defiantly going the unconventional route, Sarah postponed her university studies and has spent the majority of her twenties adventuring abroad. Of the 24 countries she has travelled through, Sarah has lived in South Africa, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, the Netherlands and France. Her favourite spot on this earth is the vast Nepalese Himalayas.

On her travels (and on any given Sunday), you could find Sarah lost in the outdoors, people watching or finding new ways to know herself better. In fact, Sarah’s love of writing can be traced back to almost a decade ago, sitting in a local bar in Dharamshala, India with her scruffy notebook and pen, watching people go by and trying to piece together a story about who they might be. If not indulging in food and coffee, Sarah loves any opportunity to disappear into the mountains. Sarah’s long distance hiking adventures include two to three week treks in the Himalayas and an 800km ‘stroll’ on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. She is a firm believer that sometimes disconnecting from the world, reconnecting with the perfect simplicity of nature, and listening to the silence is how we hear the truths inside ourselves. It makes sense then that her other interests include embodied mindfulness and yoga.

After years of travel, Sarah did however return to academia to satisfy a different kind of curiosity and is currently completing her master’s degree at the University of Cape Town. Here her passion for research and her fascination with human sexuality and well-being come together, reuniting inner and outer knowing. Sarah began her academic career in media and communication studies in the Netherlands in 2020, where her interest in sexuality grew with the realisation that it is a core and complex element of personal and collective well-being. Sarah takes an African feminist approach to her work in order to critique inequalities in the social, political and economic domains, and to illuminate where intimate experience is indeed political.

In 2023 Sarah took the opportunity to travel once again to present her research on pleasure narratives in sex education at the World Association for Sexual Health in Turkiye. Invigorated and inspired by the researchers and professionals working to make sexuality an equal, celebratory and pleasure-filled realm of experience, Sarah chose to continue her research in this field and aims to become an educator, an author and an advocate for healthy sexuality and well-being. Aside from her role as a researcher, Sarah is also a freelance copyeditor and a trained yoga teacher.

Sarah invites her readers to reflect deeply on the subtle profundities of existence and to live in its contradictions. She asks us to look at how our intimate realities connect with our social realities, and to grapple honestly with what we value and why. Most of all, she encourages her readers to find the courage to think with originality, to live by choice and not chance, and to quell the noise from the outside and look inwards for the kind of knowledge that does not come from a book or an article.

Sarah writes to you from Cape Town, affectionately known as the ‘mother city’, at the southernmost tip of Africa.