Selina Molteno

Selina Molteno was born in Cape Town and at the age of 18 travelled to Europe to pursue a career as a ballet dancer. She joined the Grand Ballet de Marquis de Cuevas in Paris and was working with that company when, at the height of the cold war, Rudolph Nureyev made his dramatic defection to the West in 1961. Her memoir of this period appears as Letters from an Intrepid Ballet Dancer (2022).

Shortly after her marriage in 1967, she and her husband Robin Cohen travelled to Ibadan in Nigeria. Their two-year period in that country coincided with the Biafra War (1967-1969) and their memories of this period appear in An Expatriate Family in the Nigerian Civil War (2020).

She also spent extended periods in Trinidad and in South Africa. It was during their sojourn in South Africa that Selina met and got to know an unusual man whose biography appears as The Secret Son of Wallis Simpson (2022). Selina is also principal author of The Moltenos of the Cape (2025).

Selina lives in Oxford where she has worked in academic publishing for more than thirty years.