Lauren Beukes has a wickedly irreverent sense of humour and is as entertaining a speaker as she is a writer. She's the author of Maverick - Extraordinary Women from South Africa's past, a book on rogues, renegades and raconteurs over the last 350 years, including Brenda Fassie, Ingrid Jonker, Dolly Rathebe, Ruth First, Bessie Head, Olive Schreiner, Sara Bartmann, Lilian Ngoyi and everyone's favourite dastardly female serial killer, Daisy de Melker.

They're goddesses and icons, heroines and villains and victims who left huge indelible marks on the pages of history, but they were all also ordinary people who overcame their context. As Beukes says, "What these women had in common was that they were bound by an all-consuming passion, a uniquely different way of seeing the world and quite often a terrible sense of insecurity. I think a lot of us can relate to that."

Lauren Beukes is a writer with international credentials. As a journalist, she's written for most of the major glossies locally as well as the Sunday Times, but she's also contributed stories to Nature Medicine, The Hollywood Reporter, Dazed & Confused and Colors magazine.

In the interests of getting the story, she's jumped out of planes and into shark infested waters, hung out with teenage vampires and reluctant base jumpers, been sworn at by a Botswanan High Court Judge and the head of British American Tobacco and got the break down on making mqombothi and learned how to pole-dance.

She's had short stories published in African Road, 180 Degrees and Urban 03 and she's currently the head-scriptwriter on an animated TV series for SABC3, which allows her to play all day with a bunch of crazy cartoonists.

If your gala dinner is in need of some light relief and a dose of inspiration from South Africa's treasure trove of female heroes and anti-heroes, call on Lauren Beukes to share her insight and lessons learned while researching and writing Maverick.