Author & Artist

Spencer
Rowley

Artist, musician, and storyteller.
A life lived across continents, distilled into words.

Explore the work
Spencer Rowley
About the Author

Many lives,
one voice

Spencer Rowley was born in Rhodesia in 1958 and spent thirty-three years living and working in South Africa.

He has been, at various points, a soldier, a policeman, a husband and a father, an IT consultant, an artist, and a musician. He brings to his writing the attention of someone who has inhabited many different kinds of life and paid close attention to all of them.

His previous works include Waiting for John, an award-winning one-act play, and Sawubona, a novel. He currently lives in Nottingham, England.

Current Works

Published Writing

Novel

Sawubona

A novel rooted in the landscapes and complexities of southern Africa — a story of seeing and being seen, drawn from a lifetime of close observation.

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Stage Play

Waiting for John

An award-winning one-act play that captures the tension and quiet drama of lives held in suspension — waiting for a moment that may or may not arrive.

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Coming Soon
Novel

Franki

A new novel currently in progress. Further details to follow.

Visual Art

Oil Paintings

Alongside his writing, Spencer is a dedicated oil painter whose work is drawn above all to landscape — the vast skies, shifting light, and open terrain of southern Africa, and more recently the gentler, rain-softened countryside of England. He also turns his eye occasionally to portraiture, still life, and the built environment, but it is the land itself that calls him back to the easel.

Highveld Sunset
Oil on canvas
Midlands Morning
Oil on canvas
Estuary, Low Tide
Oil on board
Bushveld Dusk
Oil on canvas, 120 × 60cm
Nottinghamshire Green
Oil on canvas

Spencer works primarily in oils, favouring the medium for its depth, forgiveness, and capacity to hold the warmth of natural light. Landscape is his abiding subject — the burnt ochre plains and towering skies of southern Africa, and now the softer, overcast greens of the English Midlands. He is drawn to the way light transforms land, and to the quiet tension between vastness and intimacy that landscape painting demands.

He paints other subjects from time to time — a face, a building, an interior — but returns always to the open ground. His paintings share with his writing a preoccupation with close looking: the conviction that the world, observed carefully enough, reveals more than enough beauty and strangeness to fill a lifetime's work.

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He brings to his writing the attention of someone who has inhabited many different kinds of life and paid close attention to all of them.