Karina Author, Book, Distribution

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 In 2022, Sand Roses was shortlisted for the Island Prize for unpublished African authors.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.

Karina Author, Book

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.

Karina Author, Book

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.

Karina Author, Book

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

Author photograph by Nic Mayger

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.

Karina Book

Karavan Stories 2024: Workshop and Anthology

After the success of Tiger: Karavan Stories 2023, be part of the second Karavan Stories anthology! We will meet again for a writing workshop at the end of April and together analyse what makes a good short story, read examples, go through a few writing exercises, begin exploring ideas for new stories and in the following months write, edit and compile an anthology of stories which will be published by Karavan Press.

WORKSHOP DATE: Saturday, 20 April 2024, 9:00 – 15:00

VENUE: 6 Banksia Road, Rosebank, 7700 Cape Town

PUBLICATION DATE: November 2024

FEE: R3 900

Includes: workshop, catering during the day of the workshop, guidance and feedback, editing, proofreading, 5 copies of the anthology and the option to submit your next manuscript to Karavan Press.

To book your spot, contact Karina: Karavan Stories 2024

If you cannot afford the fee but would like to participate, please get in touch. Two places will be available to writers who require financial assistance.

Maximum number of participants: 12.

Participants not based in Cape Town can join via Skype (maximum two).

FACILITATOR / EDITOR: Karina M. Szczurek is the author and (co)editor of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, most recently two anthologies of short stories, Fluid: The Freedom to Be (with Joanne Hichens, Tattoo Press, 2023) and Tiger: Karavan Stories 2023 (Karavan Press). She won the MML Literature Award in the Category English Drama in 2012 and received the Thomas Pringle Award for a portfolio of ad hoc reviews from the English Academy of Southern Africa in 2018. She is a board member of Short Story Day Africa. In 2019, she founded Karavan Press, an independent publishing house, and a year later, established the Philida Literary Award.

Karina Book

Karavan Press in 2023

At the end of last year, I knew for the first time in four years that Karavan Press would make it, that we were here to stay, and that we would thrive. But not even in my wildest dreams could I have predicted the insane year that we would have in 2023. For most of the twelve months, whenever someone asked me how many books we’d published or how many books we were still working on, I was afraid to count – I thought that if I counted, I would not be able to go on. It was only towards the end of November that I braved the numbers, and although we still had a few projects on the go, I went into a temporary state of paralysis and took a break. Personal circumstances (loss, real and potential, and complicated grief) contributed to the mental professional block, and I did let a few balls, or rather books, fall … But as the year comes to an end, after a short Festive Season rest, I am emerging from the exhaustion and plan to pace myself better in the new year.

In 2023, I worked with over a hundred different authors – mainly as publisher and editor, but also as mentor and friend – and as publisher, editor and distributor, I was involved in the publication of twenty-two individual books, two issues of a literary magazine (I resigned from all of my functions at New Contrast last year, but helped with two issues of the transition) and FLASH, a chapbook. We published seventeen books (three of them are debuts: Michael Boyd’s The Weight of Shade, Frankie Murrey’s Everyone Dies and Beatrice Willoughby’s So,) at Karavan Press in 2023, and one more is already printed and ready for release in early 2024.

A few of last year’s titles were nominated for awards this year: Joy Watson’s The Other Me, Lester Walbrugh’s Elton Baajties and Stephen Symon’s Small Souls. Additionally, Michael Boyd and Nick Mulgrew were nominated for literary awards with their short stories. Heartfelt congratulations, you brilliant, wonderful people!

Earlier this year, Héloïse Press, a Canterbury-based indie publisher of literary fiction specialised in contemporary female narrative, has acquired Breaking Milk by Dawn Garisch, one of Karavan Press’s first titles. Thank you to Aina and Catrina for making it happen. We cannot wait to see the UK edition make its appearance next year.

In August, we celebrated Sindiwe Magona’s 80th birthday with the publication of Sindiwe’s Gift (compiled by Thokozile Sayedwa and Nancy Richards), a collection of personal essays by people whose lives Sindiwe has touched throughout her illustrious career, and launched Karavan Stories, a workshop and anthology project that resulted in the publication of Tiger: Karavan Stories 2023. It was such a joyous project to work on that I decided to do Karavan Stories 2024 – theme to be decided by workshop participants. Watch this space …

Together with the Rosebank Writers and The Red Wheelbarrow, especially Kerry Hammerton and Melissa Sussens, we organised the Festival of Poetry, and it was such a gigantic success that it might return in one form or another next year. Thank you to Kerry and Melissa for your stellar work! Those of you who are missing the Karavan Press Literary Festival – have no fear, it will return with a bang in March 2024.

None of it would have been possible without the editors (especially Joanne Hichens, Finuala Dowling, Joy Watson), designers (Monique Cleghorn, Stephen Symons, Nick Mulgrew, Jennifer Jacobs, Tamara Isles, Luami Calitz), proofreaders (Nancy Richards, Mervyn Sloman, John Maytham), printers (Grant, Tim and Gavin of Castle Graphics – I know you moved mountains for Karavan Press – thank you; and Douglas of The Printing Press – what would I do without you?), distributors (Tamsin, Phil, Siya, Yaya, Nolu, Jayden – you all rock!), booksellers (special gratitude to Liberty Books, The Book Lounge, Love Books, Clarke’s Bookshop, EB Cavendish), festival and event organisers (a special shout out to Salon Hecate at Art Point Noordhoek and Woman Zone Cape Town), newspaper editors and book reviewers, literary award judges, and our amazing literary agent, Catrina Wessels.

I work with authors who are not only super-talented storytellers, but also good people whose presence in my life makes my heart fill with appreciation. Thank you to all of you for your words, creativity, kindness, understanding and patience, and for allowing me to share your stories with our Readers!

And tons of gratitude to our Readers! Without you, Karavan Press would only be a dream.

My deepest gratitude to all, but especially to John, Krystian, Mom, Joanne, Christy, Mervyn and Craig. Your support keeps me going against all odds, and those odds have never been terribly great for independent publishers … And yet, here we are!

If I forgot someone, please forgive me and know that my gratitude to all who have contributed to the wonder of this year is endless.

Happy writing and reading in 2024!

Ancient paths, new literary journeys …