Gillian Slovo has published thirteen novels, a family memoir and has also written four verbatim plays. She started in crime, writing five novels featuring her detective Kate Baeier, before branching out into narrative driven literary fiction. Ice Road, set in Leningrad in the 1930s, was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize. Red Dust, her novel based around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa won the RFI Temoin du Monde prize and was made into a film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Her memoir Every Secret Thing, that told the story of a family dominated by the dramatic politics of apartheid South Africa, was a worldwide bestseller. Her latest novel, Ten Days, was published in 2016 and screenplay rights have been bought by a TV company.

Her most recent verbatim play was Grenfell: in the words of survivors which played at the National Theatre in 2023 and at St Ann's Warehouse in New York in 2024.