Please join us for either, or both, of these two special launches of Andrew Brown’s The Bitterness of Olives.
Gardens, 19 March 2024
Franschhoek, 20 March 2024
Friends of Tokai Library: Mini Book Fair
Come and meet the authors! Karavan Press books will be available for sale.
Karavan Press becomes local distribution partner for SAND ROSES by Hamza Koudri
WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT KARAVAN PRESS IS THE SOUTH AFRICAN DISTRIBUTION PARTNER FOR SAND ROSES BY HAMZA KOUDRI, RUNNER-UP FOR THE ISLAND PRIZE 2022.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Tourists know it as the City of Joy. For Ouled Nail dancers, Bousaada is a city of horrors.
It is 1931 when two sisters arrive in Bousaada bursting with dreams of becoming successful dancers. But the city, occupied by the ruthless French colonial army, changes their lives forever.
When they kill a soldier in self-defence, Fahima and Salima must outsmart the French Colonel who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth. The sisters are driven further into a cycle of violence with every attempt to hide their crime. Risking their lives and the lives of their loved ones, the dancers find themselves at the heart of a civilizational clash.
Sand Roses is a tale of resistance, sisterhood and the shameful past of two colliding nations. This extraordinarily immersive narrative thrusts its reader into the Algerian city of Bousaada during the 1930s and the story of the Nailiya dancers.
“… an extraordinarily immersive narrative, and a fascinating story of the little-known Ouled Nail dancers.”
The Island Prize Judges
“A compelling storyteller, fresh and engaging.”
Karen Jennings, An Island
South African distribution partner: Karavan Press
Publisher: Holland House Books, UK
Publication date: 1 November 2023
ISBN: 9781739104733
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HAMZA KOUDRI has an MA in English Literature and Civilization and has been working in education and international development since 2008. Research for his novel took the better part of a decade, seeking traces of a muted past between the folds of visual documentation and oral histories. In 2022, Sand Roses was shortlisted for the Island Prize for unpublished African authors. Currently serving as the Country Director with the British Council in Algeria, he oversees a portfolio of English, STEM, higher education and cultural programmes, working closely with public sector teachers and institutions. Over the years, he has created and led courses and projects for youth and educators across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region and beyond.
During a year-long fellowship in the United States, he helped establish a mentorship programme for a social equity course at Penn State University and a teacher training certificate program for Indiana University. He also took a creative writing course with award-winning author, Elizabeth Kadetsky, during which time he started working on Sand Roses.
If you are a bookseller, please contact BOOKSITE to order copies of Sand Roses. If you are a reader, please ask your local bookshop to order the book for you via Booksite.
Karavan Press title: The Algebra of Insignificance by Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons’s poetry enters a realm of tenderness, the quiet embrace of nature, and the frailties of the human spirit from which beauty arises. I hold his poetry in the highest regard. He is a masterful image maker and a believer in the power of close looking. This poet is a gem.
– David Keplinger, author of Another City and The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems
Publication date: March 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7764726-8-0
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’. 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.
Karavan Press title: Love Stories for Ghosts by Alex Latimer
A collection of hopeful stories about living, dying and falling in love, with photographs by Guy Neveling.
An evil man is reincarnated as a terrible smell and over time falls in love with a woman. A stranger arrives at the door of a heavenly house, but unlike everyone else there, she will only live once. A person dies and goes to a place where all living things go – a menagerie of animals roaming an endless meadow – and he finds love in familiar faces. A mother and a son reunite in a heaven that is also a hell – depending on how you see it. Two people die on the moon and live undead through eons, moving through the phases of love while watching the lights on Earth flicker out.
Publication date: 8 March 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7764581-9-6
“Excitingly inventive writing that will touch you long after reading – sometimes with a cold and bony finger, and sometimes with the gentle breath of a lovesick ghost.”
– Henrietta Rose-Innes
“Unusually humorous and without sentimentality, these stories illuminate the extraordinarily strange places – in this world as well as others – that life and death will take us.”
– Nick Mulgrew
ALEX LATIMER is an award-winning picture book author based in Cape Town. He has also written three novels. Extinction, published here for the first time, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Love Stories for Ghosts is his debut collection.
GUY NEVELING has picked up numerous photography awards at international advertising festivals, but now dedicates his time primarily to personal work, continually nurturing his love for imagery. He lives in Simon’s Town.
Author: Alex Latimer
ALEX LATIMER is an award-winning picture book author based in Cape Town. He has also written three novels. ‘Extinction’, published for the first time in Love Stories for Ghosts, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Love Stories for Ghosts is his debut collection.
Author: Byron Loker
BYRON LOKER has been called by fellow South African man of letters, Ben Trovato, ‘a talented writer who could go far if only he’d give up surfing and chasing women.’ He was once a film student but is now fully rehabilitated. His literary hero is Ernest Hemingway, as you can probably tell by these staccato sentences. He lives in the ‘deep south’ of the Cape Peninsula with a very sweet ginger tabby cat named Georgie Love and a pile of regrets, chief among them being all the women who got away from him. In early 2024, Karavan Press published a new edition of Byron’s debut short story collection, New Swell, and will publish his new, Heavy Water, later this year.
Author photograph: Nic Mayger
New edition of Byron Loker’s debut collection of stories NEW SWELL
Some stories can glue you to the page because of what they say, others because of how they say it. Byron Loker’s stories do both. His tales will ring true for all South Africans who have ever surfed, or sat with an old railway man or a car guard or domestic workers. Loker has a clear eye on ordinary daily life. He is funny most of the time, but often very poignant too, in these beautifully crafted stories.
Prescribed for English Literature Study Short Stories Grade 9 – Western Cape Education Department
Publisher (this edition): Karavan Press (first published by Double Storey Books, a division of Juta & Co. Ltd 2006)
ISBN: 978-1-7764064-2-5
Publication date: January 2024
Praise for New Swell
‘… modern-day South African Beat, easy to read, sharply observed, engaging, sad, but also very funny’ – Surfers’ Path
‘If the flat naturalism recalls Hemingway, other stories, in their deliberately straight-faced contemplation of horrors, recall Bosman’ – Sunday Independent
‘… wit engaged with the human condition at a deeper level of meaning’ – Sunday Times
‘… stories different from anything that has been written in English in South Africa – they are fresh, honest, off the wall but simultaneously clear moments of everyday life. At the same time they owe much in tone and style to the work of Herman Charles Bosman without being in any way imitative. It is as if the short story tradition, which was interrupted by the dictates of apartheid, has been resumed’ – Mike Nicol
‘Stories with a light touch which has the effect, as such touches at best can do, of dredging up certain shadows or resonances that go on resonating … very affecting – and stylistically – sure-footed to a fault’ – Stephen Watson
‘… a particularly gifted and dedicated writer’ – André Brink
BYRON LOKER has been called by fellow South African man of letters, Ben Trovato, ‘a talented writer who could go far if only he’d give up surfing and chasing women.’ He was once a film student but is now fully rehabilitated. His literary hero is Ernest Hemingway, as you can probably tell by these staccato sentences. He lives in the ‘deep south’ of the Cape Peninsula with a very sweet ginger tabby cat named Georgie Love and a pile of regrets, chief among them being all the women who got away from him.
karavanpress.com 