MICHAEL BOYD grew up in Southern Africa – between Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa – before moving to the UK, where he attended the University of Kent. He worked for some time at the Sundance, Telluride, Film Africa and Cambridge Film Festivals. He was also the director and curator of the longest-running African film festival in the UK, the Cambridge African Film Festival. He then turned to a career in teaching and returned to Africa. Having taught in the Northwest Province and Kenya, he now lives in Johannesburg, continuing to work as an English teacher. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, and has published short stories in New Contrast, The Coinage Book, Active Muse, Odd Magazine and MONO Literary Journal. His story “Mama Blue” was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2023. The Weight of Shade is his debut novel.
THE BOOK In these twenty short stories of inquiry, transgression, osmosis and transformation, we embrace the fluid nature of humanity.
THE CONTRIBUTORS The anthology’s contributors are largely established South African authors who have a track record in the publishing industry, as well as exciting emerging writers. The writers include Peter-Adrian Altini, Diane Awerbuck, K. L. Bohle, Anna Hug, Kingsley Khobotlo, Yuwinn Kraukamp, Alex Latimer, Keith Oliver Lewis, Lerato Mahlangu, Shari Maluleke, David Medalie, Mabel Mnensa, Lerato Moletsane, Nadine Moonsamy, Shanice Ndlovu, Vuyokazi Ngemntu, Robyn Perros, Bridget Pitt, Lorraine Sithole, Jarred Thompson and Andrew Robert Wilson.
THE EDITORS JOANNE HICHENS has to date edited seven highly praised anthologies of South African short stories, including Bad Company, Bloody Satisfied, Adults Only and Die Laughing. She has published several crime novels, including Divine Justice and Sweet Paradise, and a memoir, Death and the After Parties.
KARINA M. SZCZUREK is the (co)editor of, among others, Touch: Stories of Contact, Encounters with André Brink, Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa and Hair: Weaving and Unpicking Stories of Identity. She is also the author of Invisible Others and The Fifth Mrs Brink.
FOREWORD: Lorraine Sithole
ISBN/EAN: 978-0-9946805-7-0 PUBLICATION DATE: May 2023 PUBLISHER: Tattoo Press
TATTOO PRESS is an independent small publisher, specializing in contemporary South African short fiction.
If you are a bookseller, please contact BOOKSITE to order copies of FLUID: The Freedom to Be. If you are a reader, please ask your local bookshop to order the book for you via Booksite.
“Grace is not to walk on water, but to sink without resistance. I let the darkest of thoughts overcome me. To have a child, I say, is exhausting, and he will run to me, he will fall asleep in my arms. I am nineteen years old, but my logic is sound—he who fucks a child cannot raise one.”
The tunnel had once beena passage through the world;now it was the world.
One evening in early autumn, ten people drive into a tunnel through the Cape mountains – and find themselves trapped.
As their limited supplies dwindle, what do they do? Where can they go? What will they find?
Tunnel burrows deep into the psychologies and coping strategies that connect and disconnect these protagonists in a dark, tense and compelling human drama.
An urgent new novel, told through many eyes; a journey – terrific and mystical – through despair, memory, and love.
“Nick Mulgrew is easily the best thing we’ve got.”
– Diane Awerbuck, Sunday Times
NICK MULGREW was born in Durban in 1990. He writes novels, short fiction and poetry.
Among his accolades are the 2016 Thomas Pringle Prize, the 2018 Nadine Gordimer Award, and a Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. His debut novel, A Hibiscus Coast, won the 2022 K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award.
Since 2014 he has directed uHlanga, an acclaimed poetry press. He currently lives in Scotland, where he studies at the University of Dundee.
Everything was familiar,but not enough to be comforting.
Fourteen rich and entangled stories set on the cosmopolitan Southern African coast and its hinterland.
Journey on broken-family vacations, or into canefields where clouds of birds fill the sky. Join a postman on his jaunt into the weird world of the ultra rich, or descend into a haunting colonial purgatory.
Meet people from all walks of life as they try to navigate them, stuck between a fragmented present and an unspeakable past.
WINNER of the 2016 THOMAS PRINGLE PRIZE
SHORTLISTED for the 2015 WHITE REVIEW PRIZE
“One never gets bored in the company of Nick Mulgrew.”
– Jean-Paul Beaumier, Nuit Blanche
Publisher: This edition Karavan Press
(First published in Cape Town by David Philip Publishers in 2016)
Publication date: May 2023
ISBN: 978-0-6397-7839-6
THE FIRST LAW OF SADNESS
Mostly I hope there is no heaven,just so you’ll never see how I’m doing.
Audacious, imaginative tales of killer eagles and paintball guns, tattoo removal and animal sanctuaries, pornographers and biltong makers; of a South Africa concurrently too strange and too familiar for comfort.
With trademark poetic and spiritual flair, these stories combine comedy and grief, spectacle, sex, and nostalgia.
WINNER of the 2018 NADINE GORDIMER AWARD
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
“Full of the possible becoming probable, of the mundane made massive, of leviathans glimpsed out of the corner of an eye.”
– Russell Grant, Mail & Guardian
“An accomplished writer [who] handles both the horror and banality of experience.”
– Diane Awerbuck, Sunday Times
Publisher: This edition Karavan Press
(First published in Cape Town by David Philip Publishers in 2017)
Publication date: May 2023
ISBN: 978-0-6397-7840-2
NICK MULGREW was born in Durban in 1990. He writes novels, short fiction and poetry.
Among his accolades are the 2016 Thomas Pringle Prize, the 2018 Nadine Gordimer Award, and a Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. His debut novel, A Hibiscus Coast, won the 2022 K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award.
Since 2014 he has directed uHlanga, an acclaimed poetry press. He currently lives in Scotland, where he studies at the University of Dundee.
Since 2015, Kim Gurney has published from arts-based research three books where contemporary art tells larger stories about the urban everyday, collective life, and social imaginaries, with a fourth in the works for 2023. These have generally focused upon ‘offspaces’ – exploring public space in Johannesburg inner-city through walking, new media and performance art; the artistic inner life of a studio building in existential limbo; the working principles of non-profit project spaces on the continent; and the invisible labours revealed by a back room institutional archive. Kim will share the processes behind assembling publications as creative outcomes which aim to perform the subject matter, and the challenges involved.
The books referenced in this talk are: The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), August House is Dead, Long Live August House – The story of a Johannesburg Atelier (Fourthwall, 2017), Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (Motto, 2022), & Flipside – The Inadvertent Archive,which is currently in production with iwalewabooks (Bayreuth, Lagos & Jhb).
Dr Kim Gurney is based at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, where she has been investigating sites of counterfactual imagination – independent art spaces, back room archives, and artisanal workshops. She brings a fusion of fine art, urban studies, and journalistic expertise together, favouring arts-based methods and experimenting with narrative forms. Her own art practice largely concerns disappearances of different kinds and makes restorative gestures – spanning studio work, public art, discourse and curation. She runs ad hoc a nomadic platform guerilla gallery; in 2023, it inhabits The Shed – a tiny space for big ideas. Kim has extensive experience as a writer and former editor in different genres, currently focused upon book projects.
Kim’s Panya Routes and August House is Dead, Long Live August House – The story of a Johannesburg Atelier are distributed by Karavan Press and Protea Distribution.
INTIMACY AND INJURYmaps the travels of the global #MeToo movement in India and South Africa. Both countries have shared the infamy of being labelled the world’s ‘rape capitals’, with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege.
Voices and experiences from the global north have dominated debates on #MeToo which, although originating in the US, had considerable traction elsewhere, including in the global south. In India, #MeToo revitalised longstanding feminist struggles around sexual violence, offering new tactics and repertoires. In South Africa, it drew on new cultures of opposing sexual violence that developed online and in student protests. There were also marked differences in the ways in which #MeToo travelled in both countries, pointing to older histories of power, powerlessness and resistance. Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles.
INTIMACY AND INJURY is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates that are rarely brought into conversation with one another. With contributors located exclusively in South Africa and India, this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
EDITORS
Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Shilpa Phadke is Professor at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
Srila Roy is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
South African distribution partner: Karavan Press and Protea Distribution
ISBN (SA edition): 9780639749204
For Sale in South Africa and Namibia only. Not for export elsewhere.
Publication date: UK edition 2022, SA edition 2023
If you are a bookseller, please contact BOOKSITE to order copies of Cat Therapy. If you are a reader, please ask your local bookshop to order the book for you via Booksite.
karavanpress.com 