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?
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.
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.
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.
River Fugue, Sarah’s second collection, is proudly published by Karavan Press.
The lone palm shakes its dangling locks
to brush off marauding gales. It tilts
then straightens, a Sisyphus of grit.
But the onslaught persists for years as
intent rips through the flesh of leaves,
snaps the bones of branches.
Cracked bonds run up and down
the tree’s trunk, tall with optimism,
but now bowing to an unseen god.
Then,
every cell lets go, breathless,
the concrete sky falls.
– ‘Hurricane’
‘Mr. Williams became a whistle-blower and was the source of many of the emails and other information that the judicial commission relied on …’ – New York Times
ATHOL WILLIAMS is an applied philosopher and poet based in the UK. He holds seven degrees including a doctorate from Oxford University, where he currently lectures. He is the recipient of numerous literary, academic and public service awards including two Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Awards and the Mayor’s Medal for Extraordinary Bravery from the City of Cape Town. Athol has been living in exile since 2021 after exposing state capture in South Africa. End & Beginning is his seventh book of poetry.
ATHOL WILLIAMS is an applied philosopher and poet based in the UK. He holds seven degrees including a doctorate from Oxford University, where he currently lectures. He is the recipient of numerous literary, academic and public service awards including two Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Awards and the Mayor’s Medal for Extraordinary Bravery from the City of Cape Town. Athol has been living in exile since 2021 after exposing state capture in South Africa. End & Beginning, proudly published by Karavan Press, is his seventh book of poetry.
Mannequin Pictures has optioned the screen rights to the political thriller Good Hope, the debut novel of South African author, political advisor and communications specialist, Nick Clelland, for adaptation into a series. The deal was brokered by literary agent Catrina Wessels on behalf of Karavan Press.
Mannequin, a Johannesburg-based, award-winning production company specialising in South African content for an international audience, plans to produce a high-end series based on Clelland’s gripping, dystopian novel set in an alternative present-day Cape Town.
“It’s a fictional projection of what a breakaway Cape Republic might be like to live in. […] In it, Clelland imagines a totalitarian and surveillance state that projects the perfect Cape society with frightening revelations of what keeps it going,” writes Ferial Haffajee, veteran journalist and newspaper editor, on Daily Maverick, describing it as a must-read novel that she read in one sitting.
“There’s a rich world of story which we would like to see live at its fullest on screen,” says Warwick Eccles, development executive at Mannequin, about Good Hope.
The adaptation will be developed by Mannequin Pictures as part of its growing slate of prestige projects aimed at both local and international audiences.
About the book
THE WESTERN CAPE IS NOW AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY. SUCCESSFUL, SAFE, MURDEROUS.
Lisa Robinson has moved from Durban to Cape Town to be with Grant, the prospective next First Minister of the Good Hope Territory. The GHT is the safest and most prosperous country in the southern hemisphere – at a price. Citizens contract to be tracked by drones, executions are synchronised to the Noon Gun and only those with qualifications are permitted to vote in the Qualified Franchise system. Life here is picture-perfect. The Mother City is pristine. Everyone has a job. Tourism is booming. But this shiny new state has decided that Lisa is a problem, and problems here disappear quickly and quietly.
‘A riveting read and a scary glimpse into what happens when liberty is traded for order. Unputdownable.’ — GEORDIN HILL-LEWIS
Publication date: 29 April 2024
ISBN: 978-1-0672224-1-3
About the author
NICK CLELLAND is a political animal. He was elected to the Durban Metropolitan Council in 1996 at the age of twenty-four, and three years later as a Member of Parliament. Though quickly tired of elected politics, he has made a career of it all the same. He has worked as a political advisor, consultant and coach with mayors, ministers, premiers and prime ministers around the world, and was the brains behind Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ behaviour change strategy. A keen yet mediocre cyclist, Nick lives in Cape Town.
karavanpress.com 