What better news to share on a Monday?
We are absolutely thrilled that Héloïse Press will be publishing Breaking Milk by Dawn Garisch next year. For the full announcement, please read here: Catrina Wessels Rights Management.
Thank you to Aina Marti and Catrina Wessels for making this possible!
Melissa Sussens (Slaughterhouse), Dawn Garisch (Breaking Milk) and Penny Haw (The Invincible Miss Cust) in conversation with Gail Gilbride (Cat Therapy) about women, creativity, the environment and science. Melissa is a vet and a poet, and her poetry is strongly influenced by the two roles she plays in her life. As is the writing of Dawn, who is a doctor and author. Penny’s stories feature remarkable women and illustrate her love for nature and animals. And Gail’s latest work of non-fiction is about a cat who helped her survive a frightening medical diagnosis. The work of these four writers speaks to the interconnectedness of nature, humans, animals, art and science.
DAWN GARISCH, a medical doctor and writer, has published poetry, novels, non-fiction and a children’s book. She has had a short play and a short film produced and has written for television. She won the 2007 DALRO prize for her poem “Blood Delta”. Her novels, Trespass and Breaking Milk, were shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize for Fiction in Africa and the 2021 Sunday Times Fiction Prize respectively. She won the 2011 EU Sol Plaatjie Poetry Award for her poem “Miracle”. In 2013, her short story “What To Do About Ricky” won the Short.Sharp.Story competition. Her second poetry collection, Disturbance, was published in 2020. She is interested in trans-disciplinary work in science and art, and between different art forms and teaches life writing and creative method courses with the Life Righting Collective.
MELISSA SUSSENS is a queer veterinarian and poet. Her work has appeared in many publications, both locally and internationally. She placed 2nd in the 2020 New Contrast National Poetry Prize and was amongst the winners of the ClemenGold Writing Competition. She was selected for the Poetry for Human Rights anthology, Between the Silence, in 2021, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Melissa has performed at the Poetry in McGregor festival, Off The Wall, The Commons and The Red Wheelbarrow, where she also hosts poetry readings. She lives in Cape Town with her wife and their two dogs. Slaughterhouse is her first book.
PENNY HAW worked as a journalist and columnist for more than three decades, writing for many leading South African newspapers (most notably, Business Day) and magazines before yielding to a lifelong yearning to create fiction. Her stories feature remarkable women, illustrate her love for nature and animals, and explore the interconnectedness of all living things. The Invincible Miss Cust is Penny’s debut historical fiction. It was published by Sourcebooks in 2022 and will be followed by a further work of historical fiction, The Woman at the Wheel, in October 2023. Penny is also the author of The Wilderness Between Us, a contemporary fiction published in 2021 and Nicko, The Tale of a Vervet Monkey on an African Farm (2017), a children’s book. Penny lives in Hout Bay with her husband and three dogs, all of whom are well-walked.
GAIL GILBRIDE was born in Pretoria. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rhodes University and a post-graduate teaching diploma from UCT. In a previous life she taught English, Sound Perception and Communication Skills. She also used to dance and mastering the Tango is still on her wish list. Her novel Under the African Sun was published by Cactus Rain in 2016, and it was selected as a top ten finalist in the Author Academy Awards competition (USA). Cat Therapy is her unplanned memoir. Gail lives on the edge of the Hemel en Aarde valley with her human and furry family, where she swims in the sea, writes, gardens and dabbles in painting.
Read an interview with Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards-shortlisted Dawn Garisch in the latest issue of Wits Review (p. 72).
Two Kalk Bay locals are shortlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards: Dawn Garisch for Breaking Milk (Fiction Award) and Mark Gevisser for The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers (Non-fiction Award). Earlier tonight, Dawn and Mark were in conversation with Olympia’s Kenneth McClarty and spoke about their books and writing lives on the outdoor terrace of the Chartfield Guesthouse, where we had also launched Dawn’s Disturbance towards the end of last year.
Thank you Dawn, Mark, Kenneth, Audrey of Kalk Bay Books and the fabulous people of Chartfield Guesthouse for a fascinating evening of stories. It was simply wonderful to attend a live book event and celebrate these two brilliant writers with other readers.
In this novel, I explore aspects of separation and connection. Several mothers I know are estranged from their adult children, and many of us are disconnected from nature, intuition and creativity. I track the nuanced task of knowing when to intervene and when to withhold action in the lives of our own or other women’s children.
However, there are situations where we need to cut – initiation, divorce, surgery. Breaking Milk uses the metaphor of milk and cheese-making to ground these preoccupations during one day in the life of Kate, a geneticist who became a farmer when ethics in her lab were compromised. I job-shadowed a friend to learn about this ancient craft that employs patience and invisible micro-organisms to preserve milk.
I am interested in the idea “you can be right, or you can have relationships”; also how our intelligence has had some disastrous consequences for the natural world on which we depend.
Embedded in these concerns is the role of women in society – what it takes to say no, and how a woman finds her feet after divorce. The books that have informed my inquiry are Disgrace by JM Coetzee, and Accident: A Day’s News by Christa Wolf.
Sunday Times Books
Continue reading:
Extract from Breaking Milk by Dawn Garisch
Read about the organic cheese farm that inspired the setting for Dawn Garisch’s Breaking Milk: FYNBOSHOEK
Follow the cheese farm on Instagram: FYNBOSHOEK CHEESE FARM
CRITERIA
The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.
CHAIR OF JUDGES KEN BARRIS COMMENTS:
It is always difficult to select a shortlist in a competition at national level, and this year the fiction prize included books published in both 2019 and 2020. It was also a two-year period in which many of SA’s best and brightest novelists happened to publish, from gravitas-rich veterans to brilliant newcomers. It was a daunting but immensely enriching task for the panel, and we finally settled on five excellent novels.
Marguerite Poland is in scathing form in her heartbreaking tale of a young black missionary in the Eastern Cape, while Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu writes about colonialism and toxic masculinity with biting accuracy. Mark Winkler’s story is a subtle reflection on collective guilt and individual isolation, and Dawn Garisch’s portrayal of the struggle for connection is intelligently and beautifully observed. The youngest author in the line-up is Rešoketšwe Manenzhe with her engaging debut about migrancy and the destruction wreaked on a mixed-race family by the so-called Immorality Act.
FICTION AWARD SHORTLIST
Breaking Milk
Dawn Garisch (Karavan Press)
Set on a farm in the Eastern Cape, and taking place over one day, this is a finely wrought meditation on motherhood, not only in personal and human terms, but also with regards to ourselves as destructive children of the earth.
The History of Man
Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Penguin Fiction)
A brilliant portrait of a white, male colonialist seen through the eyes of a black woman writer. Emil Coetzee was a supporting character in Ndlovu’s prize-winning predecessor The Theory of Flight, and here she places him in the centre of the story, examining the forces that created this “man of empire”.
Scatterlings
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe (Jacana Media)
Taking place more than 100 years ago, this is a highly original novel about migrancy that incorporates myth and ritual and the stories of extraordinary ordinary women. On this journey, someone will get lost, someone will give up and turn back, and someone may go all the way to the end.
A Sin of Omission
Marguerite Poland (Penguin Fiction)
A wrenching, deeply felt story about Stephen Malusi Mzamane, a young Anglican priest, trained in England but now marooned in a rundown mission in Fort Beaufort. He is battling the prejudices of colonial society, and the church itself, when he is called to his mother’s rural home to inform her of his elder brother’s death.
Due South of Copenhagen
Mark Winkler (Umuzi)
A skilled examination of memory and culpability. Max Fritz lives quietly in a small Lowveld town, the editor of the local newspaper. Seemingly contented, he is shadowed by his childhood, and by the border war he was forced to take part in. When news of a boyhood friend reaches him, the past rears up painfully.
Read all about the Fiction & Non-Fiction shortlists here:
For book details, click here: KARAVAN PRESS BOOKS
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We are thrilled to share the news that the Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards 2021 longlists have been announced and two Karavan Press books are among the longlisted titles:
This is the 20th year of the fiction prize. The criteria stipulate that the winning novel should be one of “rare imagination and style … a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction”.
KEN BARRIS – CHAIR
Barris is a writer, editor and former academic. His fiction has been translated into German, Danish and Turkish, and he has won various literary awards for novels, short stories and poetry. These include the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the M-Net Book Prize, the Thomas Pringle Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize and the Herman Charles Bosman Prize.
NANCY RICHARDS
Richards is an independent journalist with experience in radio and print. Founder of NPO: Woman Zone and the Women’s Library at Artscape, she’s author of Beautiful Homes and co-author of Woman Today: 50 Years of South African Women on Radio and Being a Woman in Cape Town. She is a speaker, media trainer and podcasts under Woman Zone Stories and Books Stories People on pointview.fm.
WAMUWI MBAO
Mbao is a writer and essayist. He reviews fiction for the Johannesburg Review of Books and teaches South African literature at Stellenbosch University. His short story “The Bath” was listed as one of the 20 best stories of SA’s democracy, and he has compiled and edited the poetry collection Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poems of Decolonisation.
The award will be bestowed on a book that presents “the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power”, and that demonstrates “compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity”.
GRIFFIN SHEA – CHAIR
Shea is the founder of Bridge Books, an independent bookstore in downtown Johannesburg, and the author of a young adult novel, The Golden Rhino. Bridge Books focuses on African literature, and on finding new ways of getting books to readers. The store’s non-profit African Book Trust is the lead partner in the Literary District project, a collaboration among booksellers, city agencies, businesses and other volunteers. Before opening Bridge Books, Griffin worked as a journalist for 15 years, mostly with the international news agency Agence France-Press (AFP).
NOMAVENDA MATHIANE
Mathiane has been a journalist for more than 35 years. Her writing career began in 1975 as a reporter at The World newspaper, and she later joined Frontline magazine where she specialised in writing about life in South African townships. Since then she has worked for most of SA’s major newspapers. She has written three books: Beyond the Headlines, South Africa: Diary of Troubled Times, and Eyes in the Night: An Untold Zulu Story. She currently teaches isiZulu at a private primary school.
BONGANI NGQULUNGA
Ngqulunga is director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of The Man Who Founded the ANC: A Biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, which won multiple awards, including the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for non-fiction in 2018. Ngqulunga was educated at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and at Brown University in the US, where he obtained a doctoral degree.
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