I (Karina) spoke to Robyn of The Local Lit Scene Podcast about publishing.
The Local Lit Scene is a bookish podcast celebrating the South African Literature Scene beyond our past. Author interviews, book extract readings, bookish events, bookstore love and bookish discounts.
Listen here:
Please join us for the Durban launch of Griefseed!
The chosen book for the next Feminist Readers Book Club read is The Frightened by Lethokuhle Msimang. The book club will meet at The Book Lounge on 25 June 2025, 5.30 for 6PM. Can’t wait!
In this lyrical, fragmented novella, Lethokuhle Msimang uses autobiographical and poetic interventions to lead the reader through landscapes of loss and longing, travelling between France, China, Spain and South Africa, to explore the troubled terrain of leaving and finding home. At once exhilarating, heart-breaking and haunting, The Frightened speaks to the complexity of relationships, the pain of love, the effects of trauma, the necessity and constant work of healing, and the unfulfillable wish to feel a true sense of belonging. It is the story of finding one’s voice amidst inherited violence, and the importance of art and creativity in that process.
Please join Joëlle Searle, author of Odette, at Exclusive Books Constantia for a ‘meet & greet, with signing’ on Saturday, 21 June 2025, between 10:30AM and 12:30PM.
A wonderful opportunity to meet and engage with Andile Cele, the author of Braids & Migraines, published by Holland House Books and distributed in South Africa by Karavan Press and Protea Distribution.
Saturday, 21 June, 10:30 to 12:30 at Woman Zone Library, Artscape
Dear Joburg Readers,
Please join us for the Joburg launch of The Fourth Boy by Andrew Robert Wilson. Andrew will be in conversation with Michael Boyd, the author of The Weight of Shade.
LOVE BOOKS, Tuesday, 17 June 2025, 5.30 for 6PM
Hope to see you there!
Stefaans Coetzee sent Karina M Szczurek a number of questions.
Karina M Szczurek, could you please introduce yourself in a few sentences for our readers?
Polish by birth, Austrian by citizenship and South African by heart, I am a reader, writer, editor and publisher based in Cape Town. I count myself extremely lucky, because I write and work with stories for a living. After my turbulent, migratory early life, South African stories brought me to this country. The old Victorian house I share now with Salieri, my beloved literary catssistant, has been my home for the past 20 years. I am gradually approaching my fiftieth birthday, but I am still learning how to be in this strange world, and loving the adventure.
What made you decide to start a short story workshop, which would result in anthologies?
Continue reading: LitNet
Megan Hall and Shari Daya will be reading to us at The Commons on Wednesday, 4 June at 19:30 SAST.
Megan Hall won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for her poetry collection Fourth Child (Modjaji Books, 2007). Published in various journals since 1995, her work has been anthologised for schools (Worldscapes, 2005) and for university students (TheNew Century of South African Poetry, 2018), amongst others. She also writes short stories. She lives and works in Cape Town.
Shari Daya is a geographer and poet from Cape Town. Her poetry and essays explore the entangled geographies of lineage, memory, place and the body, and her work has appeared in the literary journals Obsidian, Stanzas, New Contrast and the anthologies Africa! My Africa! and I Wish I’d Said… Vol. 5, from the AVBOB Poetry Project. Shari completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town in 2023 and her debut collection of poetry and prose Land | Lines was published by Karavan Press in 2024.
As always, the reading by the featured poet will be followed by an open mic session for poets from the audience. Poets are welcome to read from their own work as well as from the work of a favourite poet.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Date: Wednesday 4 June 2025
Time: 19:30
Venue: The Commons, Surfer’s Corner, Beach Rd, Muizenberg, Cape Town, 7970
phone: 083 799 8294
For more info, including the link to the Red Wheelbarrow complete poetry archive, visit their website. Recordings of the weekly Zoom readings are on their YouTube channel.
River Fugue is Sarah Frost’s second poetry collection, and continues with the search to find herself through her connections to nature which she explored in her first collection, Conduit. The poems grapple with the persistence of wonder, how one finds it, then loses it, then finds it again. By describing the loss, they evoke it as well, the absence accentuating even more strongly what she yearns for. The collection records a coming to terms with a difficult childhood, and the renegotiation of an adult relationship with the poet’s parents. Writing to forgive, the poet has crafted poems that are transcendent and affirmatory.
In language both luminous and illuminating, Sarah Frost deciphers inner and outer landscapes throughout this strong new collection. Love and grief, loss and forgiveness are mapped and navigated with consummate skill. Rites of passage, whether into poetry or parenthood, come to vivid life. Each change in the weather arrives with the urgency of revelation, and its mystery remains unexhausted at the poem’s end. In one poem, she laments having ‘lost those eyes ablaze with wonder.’ Each poem in this collection demonstrates that she has not.
– Jacques Coetzee
Publication date: June 2025
ISBN: 978-0-6398626-2-0
SARAH FROST was born in 1973 and is mother to a twenty-year-old son and an eleven-year-old daughter. She lives in Durban, South Africa. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos Prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She was a prize-winner in the Avbob Poetry Competition in 2023.
karavanpress.com 