Wednesday, 9 December 2020, 5.30 for 6PM!
Venue: Chartfield Guesthouse in Kalk Bay.
Dawn will be in conversation with Liesl Jobson.
GIVEAWAY!
Attend the launch, buy a copy of the book at the event and stand a chance of winning a one-night luxury stay for two at the Chartfield Guesthouse!
we are mere players
in a pantomime, performing parts
which must stay true to narrative alone;
right now, this means weeping salt
into a chilli stew to the sound of the sea –
that enormous story, consistent and unfathomed,
repeating outside in the dark, endlessly.
I write into questions of discomfort, tracking an image until the poem reveals a partial answer.
— Dawn Garisch
“They are poems to break hearts, and mend them again. And I swear I heard the sound of the potter’s wheel turning in The Sound in Stone.”
— Jacques Coetzee
ISBN: 978-1-990992-57-5
Also available on Kindle: Disturbance by Dawn Garisch
Publication date: December 2020
About the author:
DAWN GARISCH Dawn Garisch is the highly acclaimed author of a non-fiction work, a memoir and seven novels, three of which were published in the UK. Her latest, Breaking Milk, was published by Karavan Press in 2019. She has written for television and has had five of her plays and a short film produced.
Her poem Blood Delta won the DALRO Prize in 2007 for best poem, and Miracle won the EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Award in 2011. Difficult Gifts, her debut poetry collection, was published the same year. She also writes short stories and her What to Do About Ricky won the Short.Sharp.Story competition in 2013.
Dawn’s novel Trespass was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in Africa in 2010, and Accident was longlisted for the Barry Ronge Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2018. She is part of the medical humanities movement and a founding member of the Life Righting Collective where she runs courses in memoir writing. Dawn is also a practising medical doctor and lives in Cape Town.
Disturbance, published by Karavan Press, is her second poetry collection.
Author photograph by AJ Wattamaniuk.
New collection of short stories from Grabouw’s Lester Walbrugh
Walbrugh’s debut anthology is titled Let It Fall Where It Will and was published by Cape Town-based Karavan Press at the beginning of November. The book was officially launched on Saturday 21 November.
Walbrugh grew up and completed his schooling in Grabouw, his home town. He looked back on his childhood in his quiet Western Cape town with much fondness.
“We played in fields, climbed trees and swam in the streams well into our teenage years. However, Grabouw was a small community then and everyone knew everyone, which could be suffocating at times.”
Growing up there, and having not read stories he could relate, to gave him the inspiration to begin writing.
“I like to think that reading indiscriminately has helped my writing in general,” Walbrugh said.
Continue reading: The South African
And here are a few more photos from the launch:
Space limited to 20 poetry lovers! Please book as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.
karavanpress@outlook.com / 0728683605
It feels like a miracle. We are going to have a socially distanced book launch for Lester Walbrugh’s story collection, Let It Fall Where It Will!
Thank you to the three literary Fairy Godmothers who are making it possible: Marion Smith of Elgin Ridge Wine Estate for providing a safe space for such an event during lockdown; Christy Weyer of Liberty Books for agreeing to sell books at the launch (in the time ‘before’ we were hoping to have the launch at her beautiful bookshop in Grabouw, but it is too small for a safe gathering of this kind); and, Bettina Wyngaard for agreeing to do the interview with Lester. Both authors grew up in Grabouw and it will be wonderful to celebrate Let It Fall Where It Will with them on their home turf.
NICK MULGREW was born in Durban in 1990. He writes novels, short fiction and poetry.
Among his accolades are the 2016 Thomas Pringle Prize, the 2018 Nadine Gordimer Award, and a Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. His debut novel, A Hibiscus Coast (Karavan Press), won the 2022 K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award. Since 2014 he has directed uHlanga, an acclaimed poetry press. He currently lives in Scotland, where he studies at the University of Dundee.
In 2023, Karavan Press published new editions of his short story collections, Stations (2016) and The First Law of Sadness (2017), and his latest novel, Tunnel.
Author photography by Adam Mays.
Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban in 1990. He is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, the recipient of the 2016 Thomas Pringle and 2018 Nadine Gordimer Awards, and the director of the award-winning poetry press uHlanga. He currently lives in Edinburgh, where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. A Hibiscus Coast is his first novel.
KAREN JENNINGS is a South African writer whose novel, An Island, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Her most recent novel, Crooked Seeds, came out in 2024 and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize. Karen has also published a collection of poetry, a collection of short stories, and several other books. From 2022 to 2024, Karen was the writer-in-residence with LEAP at Stellenbosch University, where she first came across a story which she reimagines in her latest work of fiction, Swartbooij & Titus.
Author photograph by Carol Coelho.
“Stephen Symons’s new collection is engineered for flight, gliding its way between the heavy and the weightless, memory and forgetting. It is a self-proclaimed ‘language of feathers’ that makes this flight possible, a spiritual athleticism that brings to mind George Herbert, whose idea was that the ‘fall furthers the flight in me.’ Symons’s skill is in creating a fathomable sphere for the dimensions of war, contextualizing the enormous facts with small detail, whether referencing Amichai’s ‘diameters of bombs/and sadness of open closets’ or exploring the weightless dross of childhood in the beautiful piece ‘My son was conscripted.’ Symons creates an epicentre of violence by means of an exquisite prose poem sequence that reverberates even to the quietest poems in the book. But the work, as in all of Symons’s poetry, keeps thrusting us back into the present with all its perfect natural math as counter to aftermath: a child’s laughter; sunlight trickling over mossed stones; a ballet of cormorants. This is a beautiful book by one of South Africa’s most tender poets of witness.”
— David Keplinger, author of Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1-990992-56-8
Publication date: 9 November 2020.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN SYMONS has published poetry and short-fiction in journals, magazines and anthologies, locally and internationally. His debut collection, Questions for the Sea (uHlanga, 2016) received an honourable mention for the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Ingrid Jonker Prize. His unpublished collection Spioenkop was a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize for Poetry (USA) in 2015. His second collection, Landscapes of Light and Loss, was published by Dryad Press in 2018.
Symons holds a PhD in History (University of Pretoria) and an MA in Creative Writing (University of Cape Town). He lives with his family in Oranjezicht, Cape Town.
Author photograph by Carol Bradley.
STEPHEN SYMONS has published poetry and short fiction in journals, magazines and anthologies, locally and internationally. His debut collection, Questions for the Sea (uHlanga, 2016), received an honourable mention for the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Ingrid Jonker Prize. His unpublished collection Spioenkop was a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize for Poetry (USA) in 2015. His second collection, Landscapes of Light and Loss (Dryad Press), was published in 2018, and third collection, FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT (Karavan Press), in 2020. Small Souls, a collection of collected and new poems was published in 2022 by Karavan Press. The collection was shortlisted for a South African Literary Award (2023) and includes the winning poem of the 2021 The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Competition, ‘Small Souls’. His The Algebra of Insignificance was published in 2024. Symons holds a PhD in History (University of Pretoria) and an MA in Creative Writing (University of Cape Town). He lives with his family in Oranjezicht, Cape Town. Of Salt, Dust and Love is his first collection of short stories.
karavanpress.com 