Edwin Cameron, who grew up in a poor family, studied law at Stellenbosch University. He won a Rhodes scholarship and obtained his BA in jurisprudence at Oxford University, where he was awarded the prestigious law prize, the Vinerian. He studied his LLB through Unisa and worked at the bar for three years before working for the Human Rights Institute and Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University. He defended many activists during the struggle against apartheid. He became a High Court judge in 1995 and held a temporary seat on the Constitutional Court. He now serves as a judge in the Supreme Court of Appeal.

Cameron began a gay lawyers group and worked with gay activists to safeguard the rights of gays and lesbians in the new Constitution. Having contracted HIV in the 1980s, he became ill in 1997 and began taking ARVs. He went public on his HIV status in 1999 and has fiercely fought against the stigma, discrimination, denial and silence surrounding the epidemic ever since. In 2005 he wrote Witness to Aids, which recounts his own and others’ battles with HIV. In 2006, he and HIV-positive journalist Adam Levin (author of AIDSafari) were joint winners of the Alan Paton non-fiction award.