Karina Author, Book

‘Still beating, reflecting on heart attacks and writing in the City of Gold’ by Mike Boyd

I listen to Johannesburg move around me, and I wonder how she is still able to act like nothing is wrong. When that is all I can see. Why she is not angry. I’m tired of being angry.
…

I have started to walk everywhere. I tell myself it is because I want to research my next novel. I’ve had an idea, and it involves walking the streets of the city. It’s got a big concept, but I want it to be written with a low-key, tangible realism. There are angels and monsters. I want the reader to experience Johannesburg from the ground. So, I walk to the shops whenever we need anything. I find myself making excuses to go, despite the winter darkness approaching earlier and earlier. Even better. But it’s not just the unwritten novel that pulls me onto the road. It’s not that I need to be healthier now. It’s not that I want to get my 10 000 steps each day. The real reason is more complicated. I want to hold onto the present. Be present. Slow down time. Slow it down so much that I might somehow return to a time before now, when I used to walk more.

I listen to the city move around me. The ever-present highway hums in the distance, in time to my step and the passing cars and the other walkers. To feel a part of this great madness, I realise, makes me feel smaller. And that’s what I need right now. As I pass under the shadows of the bare trees in the pale winter sun, I am reminded of what one of the main characters from my novel says: “I don’t know what to believe anymore … it all feels so heavy on my mind. The weight.” Although I was able to explain this away with convoluted literary ideas when asked about it at book launches, for the first time I understand it for myself. The weight of thoughts can have a bearing on one’s spirit …

Continue reading: LitNet

Karina Author, Book, Distribution

Karavan Press becomes local distribution partner for GLASS TOWER by Sarah Isaacs

WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT KARAVAN PRESS IS THE SOUTH AFRICAN DISTRIBUTION PARTNER FOR GLASS TOWER BY SARAH ISAACS, THE INAUGURAL WINNER OF THE ISLAND PRIZE.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Leilah meets Frankie, and the two misfits become the closest of friends at their new school – until secrets, betrayal, and sexuality drive them apart …

It’s 1997, three years after the official end of Apartheid in South Africa. Two girls from very different backgrounds, Leilah, who is mixed race, and Frankie, who is white, are drawn together when they start at a new school, one that remains racially divided despite the country’s new laws. Their friendship deepens and intensifies before suddenly falling apart when each tells the other a secret. The girls must grapple with young womanhood alone, leaving Leila with only her troubled family to fall back on.

Glass Tower is a powerful, beautiful story of two young people on a journey of sexual hurt and personal discovery which asks questions of who we are and why we love, set against a new and confusing social order.

Winner of the 2022 Island Prize for debut African novels

‘Sarah Isaacs writes with sensitivity and care about the pains of adolescence in a changing society coming to terms with the dark history of South Africa.’ — Karen Jennings, An Island, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARAH ISAACS is a writer and visual storyteller based in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in 1985 to a Coloured father and white mother, she occupied an undefinable place within the Apartheid system of racial division. Not belonging to one group or another has informed much of her life experience and continues to be one of the key drivers in her work. After graduating from a psychology degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2009, Sarah shifted her professional focus to portrait and documentary photography, creating safe spaces for South African women to share their everyday struggles. Boosted by the voices of those women she photographed, she was able to explore her own relationship to issues of identity, gender-based violence and the impact of infertility on a woman’s sense of self. In 2018, she invited victims of GBV to be photographed as a way of sharing their stories of sexual trauma and turned the lessons she learnt from that portrait series into a 2019 TEDx talk, which centred on survivor shame and its implications for the expression of vulnerability. Sarah completed Glass Tower in 2021. It went on to win The Island Prize for debut fiction from Africa in 2022.

Publisher: Holland House Books, UK

Publication date: 24 August 2023

ISBN: 978-1-7391047-4-0

HAPPY PUBLICATION DAY, SARAH!

If you are a bookseller, please contact BOOKSITE to order copies of Glass Tower. If you are a reader, please ask your local bookshop to order the book for you via Booksite.

Karina Author, Book

Karavan Press title: Everyone Dies by Frankie Murrey

I consider all the words I have access to and finally write ‘help’ and slip it under the door of the empty room, along with a blank page and a pen.

EVERYONE DIES

A SERIES

by FRANKIE MURREY

Late at night, I count down from the scar in my memory to where I am now, to where I will one day be. Four months today. In another six years and eight months, no part of me will have touched any part of you. And then I think, I will be fully recovered. Re-covered. Sometimes while I count, I cry. Very briefly. It means nothing.

Publication date: 8 September 2023

ISBN: 978-1-7764581-3-4

FRANKIE MURREY worked in the book retail sector for many years before becoming the coordinator of Open Book Festival, which takes place every year in early September in Cape Town. In 2015, her work was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She resigned from Open Book Festival at the end of 2019 and started her own company, FM Project Management. Through this company, she has since been curating or managing creative events and projects that align with her interests. She also returned to Open Book in 2022, a space she’d missed intensely. Everyone Dies is her authorial debut.

Karina Author

Author: Frankie Murrey

FRANKIE MURREY worked in the book retail sector for many years before becoming the coordinator of Open Book Festival, which takes place every year in early September in Cape Town. In 2015, her work was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She resigned from Open Book Festival at the end of 2019 and started her own company, FM Project Management. Through this company, she has since been curating or managing creative events and projects that align with her interests. She also returned to Open Book in 2022, a space she’d missed intensely. She won the HSS Award for Best Emerging Author in the Fiction Category for her authorial debut, Everyone Dies, in 2024. A Collection of Gaps is her second volume of stories. 

Karina Uncategorized

Author: Diane Awerbuck

DIANE AWERBUCK is a prizewinning writer, reviewer, editor and teacher. She writes femme/goth thrillers (Home Remedies); memoirs (Gardening at Night); pandemic cowboy thrillers (South, as Frank Owen; North, as Frank Owen); doctorates on trauma (The Spirit and the Letter); holy-wholly poetry (As above, so below); and short story collections (Cabin Fever; Inside your body there are flowers). She hopes you are sitting comfortably.

Karina Author, Book

Karavan Press title: Inside your body there are flowers by Diane Awerbuck

What do I know? 
I know white people. I know loss. I know arrogance and disaster, natural and unnatural. I know the mythical sometimes crosses in and descends on us in our extremity like heat mist, like haze.  
Let me write my story about the man Malan, who is contracted to build a dam in Zimbabwe. 
Let me write about the collapse of our projects, of our expectations and desires, and about the things that are given to us in their place. The gifts of suffering. The gifts of apocalypse. Let me write about his little boy who died before him, about mermaids and sour worms and the great snake, Nehushtan, about all the creatures who crowd around us unseen on the earth. 
All you red-faced men of my youth, with your moustaches and your beer boeps and your vulnerable eyes: here is your story.

“Mesmerising, at times shocking, and teeming with honesty, wit, razor-sharp prose and gasp-inducing insights, it’s no exaggeration to say that this is the finest and bravest collection of short stories I’ve ever read.” – Sarah Lotz

Publication date: 8 September 2023

ISBN: 9-781776-458141

DIANE AWERBUCK is a prizewinning writer, reviewer, editor and teacher. She writes femme/goth thrillers (Home Remedies); memoirs (Gardening at Night); pandemic cowboy thrillers (South, as Frank Owen; North, as Frank Owen); doctorates on trauma (The Spirit and the Letter); holy-wholly poetry (As above, so below); and short story collections (Cabin Fever; Inside your body there are flowers). She hopes you are sitting comfortably.

Karina Author, Book, Prize

THE OTHER ME by JOY WATSON shortlisted for the UJ Debut Prize

Announcement of the UJ Prize Shortlists (Debut Prize and Main Prize) for Works Published in 2022

The University of Johannesburg Prize (UJ Prize) for South African Writing is delighted to announce the shortlist for books published in 2022. The UJ Prize opened for submissions on 25 October 2022 and closed on 31 January 2023.

We received a record number of entries this year, and a panel comprised of seven judges considered the submissions. Following a rigorous adjudication process, the judges have shortlisted the following books in the respective categories:

Debut Prize

  • Boy on the Run (novel) by Welcome Mandla Lishivha
  • The Other Me (novel) by Joy Watson
  • Things My Mother Left Me (novel) by Pulane Mpondo

Main Prize

  • An Angel’s Demise (novel) by Sue Nyathi
  • Greyheart (poetry) by Lesego Rampolokeng
  • How to be a Revolutionary (novel) by C.A. Davids

The panel of judges drawn from three different universities around South Africa, selected these six titles out of more than 100 entries. “The overwhelming response to the prize is indicative of the growth and diversity of South African writing,” said Professor Ronit Frenkel, Chairperson of judges and Head of the English Department at the University of Johannesburg.

The final results will be announced on 14 September 2023.

Congratulations, Joy, and all other shortlisted writers!