Caritas at Temenos Cnr Voortrekker and Bree St., McGregor, Western Cape
Read an interview with Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards-shortlisted Dawn Garisch in the latest issue of Wits Review (p. 72).
STUNNING NATURE & ART LOCATION | ULTRA-MODERN DESIGNER ACCOMMODATION
Dear Writer,
You haven’t seen anything like this before.
Imagine having five heavenly days to write and write and write in the heart of the wilderness yet with all the modern amenities available to you. Not only that, you’re a step away from an amazing outdoor art exhibition in the NIROX Sculpture Park that you can visit at any time. Located in the Cradle of Humankind, all this could be yours for just R100 entry ticket for this Life Righting Collective lucky draw competition.
Huge thanks to LRC friend Clara Cruz-Almeida for offering this special place as a writing retreat micro-home pod for our LRC fundraiser!
WHERE?
The POD is located inside the NIROX Sculpture Park in the Cradle of Humankind on the R540, 20 minutes from Lanseria Airport; 45 minutes from Johannesburg & Pretoria. Entry to the park is free for dwellers of the POD. A very safe and protected area, the property has guards who inspect the fences at night.
PLEASE NOTE: Travel costs to and from the POD location are for the winner’s account.
A beautifully fitted kitchen has a two-plate gas hob, fridge but no oven or microwave. There’s a braai grille but please bring your own wood, coal and firelighters; you can pick up kindling in the forest. All the necessary cutlery, pots and plates are provided.
A mezzanine bedroom is accessed via a built-in ladder, sleeps two and all linen and towels are provided.
WHEN?
DATES: Monday 1 Nov to Friday 5 November 2021. Check-in is from midday 1 Nov and checkout by 11:00 am on 5 Nov.
WEATHER
Weather is a bit colder in the evenings than Joburg, with lots of dew and spider diamond webs in the early morning before humans move around. It is close to the Bloubankspruit river.
WHAT TO BRING
Bring clothes, warm layers and a T-shirt or two; also an extra blanket to wrap yourself in so that you can enjoy the braai in the evening. Bring a torch so you can take walks in the park at night to scare away the snakes. Yes, there are snakes. It is the wilderness. And boots, as the dew on the grass wets your trainers at sunrise. Bring your own food and drink, firelighters and wood; the restaurant “and then there was fire” is open but booked weeks in advance (you could try and book ahead). There is a bar /sandwich service you can access if you haven’t booked. NOTE: Please keep the POD locked and all openings closed when you go for a walk as a troupe of monkeys can create havoc. You can practise your aim at the monkeys with the slingshot there, and reconnect with your childhood naughty self.
YOUR ONLY OBLIGATION, APART FROM WRITING
If you post on social media about your stay, please hashtag #podidladla and #liferightingcollective or check-in on Facebook, or send Clara a review of your stay that she can quote you on!
HOW TO ENTER
All you have to do is purchase a lucky draw ticket by paying R100 to the LRC Banking account:
ABSA
Life Righting Collective
Cheque account number: 40 9382 6013
Branch code number 632005.
Please include your full name as reference.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
Send your POP to terry@liferighting.com with your name and contact details: email and phone number please, so we can contact you if you’re the lucky winner. All proceeds will go towards supporting the LRC. You’re very welcome to purchase more than one ticket and increase your chances of winning!
Members of the Life Righting Collective EXCO are excluded from the competition. The winner will be decided by drawing a random name and will be contacted to make booking arrangements directly with Clara.
The competition is now open and will end on 13 October 2021. The winner will be announced on the 15 October 2021.
Please share and forward this to anyone who might be interested in buying tickets for this fabulous writing retreat.
You could be a winner! And whatever happens, you’re supporting a winning cause… 🙂
Love 
And the LRC EXCO team
PS: We’d be so grateful if you would consider joining 24 other LRC supporters and become a Patreon member of the LRC for as little as R95 a month. Click on the button below.
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:
My mother’s garments never seemed to grow old. Slack suits and twin sets from the seventies, woven from some synthetic substance that did not wear or tear, unlike the natural fibre of her skin. My aged mother’s delicate covering bled every time she stumbled. Worn out; worn to shreds. — "Going home", Disturbance, Dawn Garisch It has just gone six a.m. I walk my son down the road to the corner where we wait for his lift. The sun is rising, the light streaking the horizon gold. I comment on the morning buzz, the company we keep, power-walkers, the dog walkers, workers and school kids heading for the train. ‘The day carries on.’ Without you, the day must carry on. Al says, ‘Of course, but let me remind you that you’re wearing pyjamas.’ — Death and the After Parties, Joanne Hichens They fled with nothing, never stopping. Not even when his mother tripped, his sister, tied to her back, knocking her head so hard that a bump rose immediately. She had been crying, now she screamed. Yet still they ran, amid their own blood and spittle, as the black cloud of the burning valley hunted them, chasing them forward, forward, towards the blue sky. — An Island, Karen Jennings Now Shirley, you know, became a mother quite young – sixteen or something like that. She ran away from home with newborn Jason; his naeltjie at his belly hadn’t even fallen off yet. Came to Cape Town where she thought no one would find her. The Northern Cape was far. — "Homeful", Let It Fall Where It Will, Lester Walbrugh Lexi shrugged off her coat. She heard the rustle of beads as her mother, Sandra, came through the hippie curtain from the kitchen at the end of the long hallway. Like the town was bisected by a highway, so was their house by the passage. ‘I thought you would be asleep by now.’ Lexi feigned surprise. ‘I waited up. You’re my responsibility now.’ Her mother was in a kaftan, her hair long and loose. She looked like she’d escaped from the Mamas and the Papas. ‘Yay.’ The joys of being dumped and fleeced by her husband never ceased. — A Fractured Land, Melissa A. Volker I still remember my mother’s words when we got in the car to go to mass. ‘It’s Christmas, Mary, not a funeral.’ But I’ve always worn black. I would have said she was tempting providence, if that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she would say. I should have, though. When we got home, a bunch of armed response cars were blocking the gates to the complex. The police were there. Men in bulletproof vests. Guns. — A Hibiscus Coast, Nick Mulgrew Not a word was exchanged between us as my mother and I made our way home. She must have seen how disappointed I was for, as soon as we walked into the house, she turned to me, demanding – ‘Where is the form?’ Puzzled, I looked at her. What use was that form now? What would she do with it? Only my father could sign it; and he had flatly refused, hadn’t he? ‘Give me the form, Thembi.’ ‘Why, Mama?’ ‘Letha, bo!’ My mother forged Baba’s signature. I applied for a passport, astounded by my mother’s actions. She had shown me a side of her I didn’t suspect existed. — Theatre Road, Sindiwe Magona The lagoon has forgotten us like a son sometimes forgets his father but never his mother — "Port is red and starboard green", For Everything That Is Pointless and Perfect, Stephen Symons But tell me this: where is his irrepressible, eternal soul? Because that is what interests me more. Where is his spirit, free of the gritty, grey residue of his body, which I have felt with my own hands? Because I, with the five senses of a woman, and undeniable sixth one 16 of a mother, cannot fathom the dimension within which my child now exists. — "Lost", Earth to Mom, Sue Brown
For book details, click here: KARAVAN PRESS BOOKS
Delivery options:
Cape Town: next working day after payment reflects in our account, to your door within 20km of Rondebosch Common.
Rest of South Africa: within a few working days after payment reflects in our account, to your nearest Postnet office.
Contact us for other delivery arrangements, if required.
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.
karavanpress.com 