Sometimes, she says, when we are afraid that our own narratives are at risk of being erased, we stop investigating history, and risk becoming stagnant in the process. That is why we have an obligation to keep on interrogating the past as fully as we are able to. If there is a lesson to be had in An Island (I hasten to add that, to the story’s credit, it doesn’t trade in easy morals), it is that this obligation never comes to an end. We cannot, like Samuel, retreat to our little enclaves of memory and build walls to keep out the world. Even those of us battling ghosts from the past — and maybe especially those of us battling ghosts from the past — need to keep our noses to the wind, to the strange new forms of relation blowing in from distant shores.
Daily Maverick
POETRY IN MCGREGOR: KARAVAN POETS
Karavan Press Poets Dawn Garisch, Stephen Symons and Justin Fox read from and discuss their poetry collections
MC: Karina M. Szczurek (Karavan Press)
Sunday, 21 November: 9-10:30AM
@ Caritas | Temenos
Caritas at Temenos Cnr Voortrekker and Bree St., McGregor, Western Cape
Book your ticket here: R50
EVENT Brittle Paper | Q&A with Karen Jennings on The Island Prize for African Writing
For more information, please see: Brittle Paper
To register: Q&A with Karen Jennings on The Island Prize for African Writing
Wits Review: “Go With the Slow” – an interview with Dawn Garisch
Read an interview with Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards-shortlisted Dawn Garisch in the latest issue of Wits Review (p. 72).
Somak Ghoshal reviews AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings
It’s tempting to imagine the island as a symbol of imperial ambitions, though the idea of Samuel, thwarted all the way by life, as an oppressor is also risible. If anything, An Island reveals the shifting sands of power and the persistence of inequality, even among the most wretched. Like her great literary forbearers—Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee—Jennings makes bold this ineradicable truth.
Mint Lounge
Audio book: An Island by Karen Jennings, narrated by Ben Onwukwe
An Island by Karen Jennings will be released by QUEST from W. F. Howes Ltd as audio book on the 14th of October.
The book is narrated by Ben Onwukwe, the British film, radio, theatre and voice actor, currently to be seen as Jackson Donckers in the Ben Miller crime drama on ITV and Brit Box, Professor T.
AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings shortlisted for the K. SELLO DUIKER MEMORIAL LITERARY AWARD
It gives us great joy to announce that An Island by Karen Jennings has been shortlisted for the K. SELLO DUIKER MEMORIAL LITERARY AWARD in the South African Literary Awards (SALA).
The shortlist also includes Lihle Sokapase’s Yapatyalaka Ibhobhile (isiXhosa) and Brian Fredericks’s As die Cape Flats kon praat (Afrikaans).
Congratulations to all shortlisted authors in this and all other categories!
karavanpress.com 