Karina Event

COFFEE WITH KARAVAN PRESS

You are invited to the fifth and last Coffee with Karavan Press this year where you can chat to me, Karina, founder and publisher of Karavan Press, and likeminded writers and readers over a cup of coffee – or tea, of course – about anything related to book-writing-editing-publishing-reading. Karavan Press’s home will be open, and I will be ready to answer your questions and discuss your projects.

No need to RSVP. Just ring the bell between 10AM and 12PM on Saturday, 13 December 2025. Coffee and tea will be served. Karavan Press books will be on sale at great prices. Lat minute Christmas shopping made easy … 🙂

Karina Author, Book

SECRETS: Karavan Stories 2025

SECRETS is the result of the Karavan Stories Workshop & Anthology project, now in its third year.

All the contributors gathered for a writing workshop at the end of April. Together, we discussed the intricacies of the short story, went through several writing exercises, decided on a theme for our anthology and began exploring ideas for individual stories. In the following months, we kept in touch, drafting and redrafting, until the book you are holding in your hands took shape.
We chose the theme for the anthology – secrets – within the group. Contributors could work with it in any way they wished, either reimagine it, see it as a springboard or a metaphor, or let their imaginations soar.
The stories which emerged interpret ‘secrets’ in wonderfully intriguing ways, inviting us to turn the pages with curiosity, anticipation and, occasionally, with a sinking feeling of dread.
I would like to thank all contributing authors for embarking on this journey with Karavan Press: your stories confirm something about local authors that has never really been a secret – you rock! A big thank you to Monique Cleghorn and Stephen Symons for the stunning design of our anthology. To our readers: enjoy!

Karina M. Szczurek
Cape Town, December 2025

Contributors: Lucienne Argent, Zubayr Charles, Christine Coates, Máire Fisher, Nina Geraghty, Rob Glenister, Merle Levin, Michelle A. Meyer, Firdose Moonda, Helen Nevin, Joëlle Searle, Jana van Niekerk

ISBN: 978-1-0492-2960-7

Publication date: December 2025

Karina Author, Book

Karavan Press title: Let’s Be Legends by Chantal Stewart

Cover artwork, ‘Echoes’ © Liffey Joy

Shouldn’t everyone have such a night
without thoughts
without words
only taste and touch and smell
and the light behind closed eyes
slightly red
slightly yellow?

‘In Let’s Be Legends, Chantal Stewart leads the reader into her intimate life and asks us to bear witness to her love of the land and family, nature and the night sky, and to her connection to a foreign city and to loves. She also shows us the comfort of a mature love, getting married and building a home with that love. At the centre of this collection is the curious poet who asks us to pay attention to the small things – the tortoise, a field mouse, red dust, the smell of paraffin, pink toenails, eggshells, a child’s kite; and to big issues – gender-based violence, war, refugees and displacement. Her call is for you to feel life. You also have to admire a poet who uses the word paraphernalia and makes it sing.’—KERRY HAMMERTON

CHANTAL STEWART is a medical doctor and has worked in an academic hospital for most of her life. Her first love has always been writing and she completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCT. Her debut novel, The Veil of Maya, was published in 2022 and was joint winner of the NIHSS Award for Best Novel in the Fiction Category (2023) and the UCT Book Award (2024). She has also published poems and short stories in Women Flashing (2006), Writing the Self (2008), Twist (2006) and Stanzas (2021, 2024). She facilitates writing workshops and retreats for beginner and experienced writers. Let’s Be Legends is her first collection of poems.

Publication date: December 2025

ISBN: 978-0-6398626-9-9

Karina Author

Author: Chantal Stewart

CHANTAL STEWART is a medical doctor and has worked in an academic hospital for most of her life. Her first love has always been writing and she completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCT. Her debut novel, The Veil of Maya, was published in 2022 and was joint winner of the NIHSS Award for Best Novel in the Fiction Category (2023) and the UCT Book Award (2024). She has also published poems and short stories in Women Flashing (2006), Writing the Self (2008), Twist (2006) and Stanzas (2021, 2024). She facilitates writing workshops and retreats for beginner and experienced writers. Let’s Be Legends is her first collection of poems.

Karina Author, Book, Event

Blackwell’s Oxford Events: Elleke Boehmer ICE SHOCK with Lara Feigel

Blackwell’s, Broad Street Oxford

Dec 3 from 5:30pm to 6:30pm GMT

Overview

Join us for a discussion chaired by Lara Feigel with Elleke Boehmer, author of the new book ‘Ice Shock’

Ice Shock

The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.

Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them. Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.

“Ice Shock is a propulsive and eerie love story told frame by perilous frame. Threat lurks everywhere in the gaps, beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ real and imagined Antarctic worlds.”

— Jason Allen-Paisant, winner of the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023

Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer is the author of the novels Screens against the Sky (shortlisted David Higham Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize, 2000), Nile Baby (2008) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015; co-winner Olive Schreiner prize, 2015–18), as well as the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). To the Volcano, her second short story collection, appeared in 2019. The story ‘Supermarket Love’ was commended for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. Her fiction probes the delicate interface between our private and public selves in haunting and unforgettable ways.

She is also Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a founding figure in the field of postcolonial literature. Her edition of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was a 2004 summer bestseller, and her acclaimed biography of Nelson Mandela (2008) has been translated into Arabic, Malaysian, Thai, Kurdish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. She has published several other books including Stories of Women (2005), the anthology Empire Writing (1998), Indian Arrivals: Networks of British Empire (2015), and Postcolonial Poetics (2018).

Lara Feigel

Lara Feigel is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel. Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for the Guardian and contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Her new book, Custody: The Secret History of Mothers comes out in January 2026.

Karina Author, Book

Karavan Press title: Swartbooij & Titus by Karen Jennings

IT WAS IN 1739 when the wars in the northern frontier of the Cape began. Ten settler farmers with ox wagons and trading goods, and several Khoisan servants, spent a month with the Groot Namaqua at the kraal of Chief Gal. Bribed with promises of cattle, the servants broke into the kraal. The foray resulted in several deaths, including that of the Chief. The settlers, however, reneged on their promise …

Two individuals played a key role in these events, the formerly loyal Khoisan servant Swartbooij and his son Titus. Enraged by being tricked, the two incited various raids on the settler community in retaliation. The ensuing cycles of revenge eventually led to a brutal massacre of Khoisan women and children.

Part prose, part poetry, Swartbooij and Titus reimagines the story of the unyielding father and son and the times that shaped them.

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 the story of Swartbooij and Titus.

Publication date: November 2025

ISBN: 978-0-6398626-6-8

Karina Author, Book, Review

Nancy Richards reviews Tunnel by Nick Mulgrew

I have been in some unexpected, uncomfortable and unsettling situations in my book journeys. But never quite like the one that stretches out in Tunnel. The title itself conjures a certain inescapability with a darkness, at the end of which there is not always light. A tunnel is described as an ‘artificial passage – especially one built through a hill or under a building road or river’. It’s the artificial bit, that gets to me, it’s not natural and in this particular tunnel, it’s certainly not normal.

It starts out innocently enough with Andreas and Samuel sniping at each other in the familiar, but spikey the way that couples getting on each other’s nerves do. They’re in Samuel’s inherited Oldsmobile, a bad start, and headed for a much-needed weekend away – on a road that goes through a mountain, via, yup, a tunnel. If you’re from the Cape, you’ll recognize which one. But if you’re phobic about breaking down in a tunnel, better stop reading now. Because this is when the you-know-what hits the fan. Suddenly they’re not alone. Enter a khaki-clad woman just flown in from Harare, in a red rental. Turns out she’s a location scout, but the point is, she’s competent, not so the boys. And then there’s the robotic radio message. And just when you think you’ve got this, clearly this is no ordinary aborted road trip. ‘Ledi and the man’s eyes met as they listened. In the orange light of the tunnel, his eyes shone like amber, studded with inclusions, a glistening stillness at odds with his demeanor.’ Nor is it no ordinary piece of writing.

More characters enter the uncompromising tunnel and psychologies start to clash – it’s complicated, there’s a minibus full of previously screaming little girls, a diabetic driver and ‘they’, Mo, a bristly roadblock officer, with personal issues. There are ominous seismic noises off and the insistent Voice of South West.

Actually, all the entrapped have got issues, one way or another – and they’re all starting to snipe. I couldn’t possibly tell you what happens without giving you an escape route – but there’s a wreck, ants, the incisors of a grey-brown baby and a desiccating lack of liquid and food involved. Apocalyptic springs to mind. I can only suggest you take the book to bed with a large glass of water, a strong nerve and hopefully someone who will give you a reassuring hug. It’s just a story. I think.

First published on the Good Book Appreciation Society.

Karina Book, Event

Burning Down the House at the Oude Leeskamer

Burning Down the House is a fierce new collection bringing together the freshest, most vital feminist voices writing today. Part manifesto, part love letter, part act of resistance, these personal essays ignite conversations about popular culture and how the personal really is political. What happens when we set fire to the old stories and tell our own?

Join us on the 17th of November at 18:00 in Jannie se Leeskamer for the book talk discussing a feminist appraisal of space with Stella Viljoen, Chan Croeser, Che Adams, Kiasha Naidoo and Waratwa Zanokuhle Miya.

Free entry, but please book your seat here: BOOK TALK