The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) has selected fifteen Writing Fellows for its four-month 2020 Writing Term, which will run from February to May. Drawn from hundreds of applicants, they include outstanding scholars, writers and artists from several continents. As previously, they will stay in private suites at the JIAS complex in Westdene, Johannesburg, which will offer them a quiet space for work and reflection as well as opportunities for academic community-building. The JIAS fellows were welcomed by JIAS director – Dr. Bongani Ngqulunga on the 24th of October 2019.“The 2020 Writing Fellowship was by far the most competitive we have had since the fellowship began. The Selection Committee had a difficult time choosing fifteen successful applicants from four hundred exceptional applications. We are very pleased with this group of outstanding writers and scholars who have been chosen and look forward to welcoming them to our beautiful campus at Westdene at the beginning of the year”, said the director of JIAS, Dr Bongani Ngqulunga.Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is a Belgian/Rwandan political scientist and Senior Lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. She has published in various academic journals, is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics and Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning. She is also associate editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics. She has previously worked as Africa desk editor, journalist and columnist at the Brussels based quarterly MO* Magazine. She authored The End of the White World. A Decolonial Manifesto (in Dutch, EPO, 2019). In 2011, she delivered a TEDx talk titled: Decolonizing Western Minds. During her stay at JIAS Rutazibwa will work on a monograph titled: On The Ruins of Epistemicide: Decolonising Solidarity Through Blackness, Reparations, Dignity and Ethical Retreat, which looks at a decolonial reconceptualization of solidarity. The project paints the context in which contemporary hegemonic solidarity thinking and practices – cf. aid & development, humanitarianism, state building and democracy promotion – are understood, via critiques of coloniality and Whiteness, as problematic and in need of decolonial rethinking.