Please join us for this wonderful occasion – it will be fun! Hope to see you all there!
EXTRACT | ‘Tears Before Bedtime’ by Diane Awerbuck
This book is a chronological collection of real conversations I’ve had with my offspring, or that they’ve had with me — mostly against my will. Sometimes another adult will appear briefly, but we should always remember who the main characters/problems here are — the youth.
They’re old enough now to give their meaningful consent for publication. The ages in the text are the ages they really were at the time. There are two of them — not unlike Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat in the Hat — and they are fewer than two years apart. Sometimes the fluffy one seems to catch up in age to the squeaky one, but that’s just because of when their birthdays fall.
As to why this is being published at all, the answer is that it’s a joke book * : Van der Merwe meets yo’ mama. Telling jokes is one of the ways humans connect with their communities. Humour is illuminating when it comes to social and sexual anxieties, and it helps us find meaning and healing and support in our shared experiences. And for fun, goddammit, because what are you going to do? Cry about it? As my first stepfather used to say: “I’ll give you something to cry about!” …
Continue reading: Times Live
Karavan Press title: TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME by Diane Awerbuck
This is a little book of happiness. You’ll need someone in the room to read the really funny ones to. – PAIGE NICK
This is a joke book – a collection of real conversations I’ve had with my offspring, or that they’ve had with me, mostly against my will. I started keeping records for my own entertainment when they began to talk properly:
Two-year-old: What’s that? Me: My nipple. Two-year-old: Is it dead?
I regretted teaching them to speak once pre-adolescence and Covid lockdowns arrived – life phases with equivalent survival strategies and effects:
Nine-year-old: Good news! While you were in your meeting, I finished your puzzle! Me: … Nine-year-old: I could see it was too hard for you.
It’s still noisy here.
Thirteen-year-old: I don’t like boys. Me: Okay. Thirteen-year-old: I like cats. Me: Okay! Thirteen-year-old: So … not your daughter, then.
I hope it never ends. Life is a set-up, and parenting is the punchline. As my mother once said, ‘I hope one day you have children. And then we’ll see who’s laughing.’
Publication date: April 2025
ISBN: 978-0-6398626-0-6
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). Tears Before Bedtime is her latest offering. She hopes you are sitting comfortably.
Karavan Press Literary Festival 2025
We are delighted to announce that the fourth KARAVAN PRESS LITERARY FESTIVAL is going to take place on Saturday, 12 April 2025, at the wonderful South African Centre for the Netherlands and Flanders – SASNEV – 4 Central Square, Pinelands, Cape Town, 7405. Thank you to Eureka Barnard and the Staff of SASNEV for hosting us!
As part of the festival, Penny Haw, winner of the 2024 Philida Literary Award, will deliver the André Brink Memorial Lecture – 6 February 2025 was the 10th anniversary of André’s death, and on 29 May 2025, he would have turned 90. We will remember and celebrate together!
Also as part of the festival, Qarnita Loxton and Amy Heydenrych are offering a Creative Writing Workshop. For all details, please see below.
EVENT 1 09:30-10:15 LIFE AND LAUGHTER
Diane Awerbuck, Lisa Tredoux and Gail Gilbride speak to Nick Clelland about how to use humour in literature across the genres to address important themes that are not necessarily always funny.
EVENT 2 10:30-11:15 FINDING ONESELF
Sarah Isaacs, Anna Stroud, Kharys Ateh Laue and Lester Walbrugh talk to John Maytham about their young characters’ search for who they are and how they want to be in the world when the world is unwilling to cooperate.
COFFEE / TEA BREAK
EVENT 3 12:00-12:45 SECOND CHANCES
“Sometimes the only thing you can do to change is to leave.” (Qarnita Loxton)
Amy Heydenrych, Stephen Symons & Alex Latimer talk to Karina M. Szczurek about their characters’ opportunities for change.
EVENT 4 13:00-13:45
ANDRÉ BRINK MEMORIAL LECTURE
“Influences and Legacies” – PENNY HAW, winner of the 2024 Philida Literary Award
FREE ENTRY TO ALL EVENTS AT SASNEV!
~ ~ ~
WORKSHOP 15:30-17:30
6 Banksia Road, Rosebank, 7700 Cape Town
(Please note change of venue for the workshop!)
OPENING THE DOOR TO YOUR STORY
Join authors and collaborators – QARNITA LOXTON and AMY HEYDENRYCH – for an intimate, nurturing creative writing workshop. Get to the heart of your story, uncover the theme of your writing project and work through any potential blocks to your creative writing process in a quiet, encouraging setting.
Snacks and drinks will be served.
The workshop is open to writers of all levels, including beginners. Only 10 spots available. Please book early to avoid disappointment.
To book your spot for the workshop, please contact Karina: karavanpressfestival@outlook.com
WORKSHOP FEE R300
Books will be available for sale at great prices throughout the festival!
Karavan Press at Books on the Bay 2025
Please join us between 14 and 16 March 2025 for Books on the Bay, a wonderful celebration of local literature and inspiration, now in its third year.
Karavan Press authors participating:
Saturday, 15 March 2025
10:15-11:00 METHODIST CHURCH
In the famous words of Lorrie Moore, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” Award-winning short story exponents Dawn Garisch and Diane Awerbuck discuss with Bongani Kona the joys and challenges of their relationship with the alluring genre.
13:15-14:15 METHODIST CHURCH
The art of memoir: Anthony Akerman, Lucky Bastard; Thobeka Yose, In Silence My Heart Speaks; Julia Martin, The Blackridge House. Led by Jo-Anne Richards, three leading exponents reflect on life-writing and the life-changing process of memoir writing.
Sunday, 16 March 2025
9:00-10:00 TOWN HALL
Karen Jennings – Crooked Seeds, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction
11:30-12:30 TOWN HALL
Andrew Brown – The Bitterness of Olives: In this remarkable novel set in Gaza City, Andrew Brown – current Sunday Times Fiction Award holder – explores a complex friendship battered by political forces. In conversation with Michele Magwood.
Dawn Garisch wins the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award for her collection, What Remains
We are delighted to announce that Dawn Garisch won SALA‘s Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award 2024 for her collection, What Remains! This is the second prestigious award for What Remains. It also won the HSS Award for Best Fiction Short Stories earlier this year. Congratulations Dawn and What Remains!
The Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award is one of the South African Literature Awards (SALA). This year, two other Karavan Press titles featured on the SALA shortlists: Sipho Banda’s A Crowded Lonely Walk was nominated for the Poetry Award, and Diane Awerbuck’s Inside your body there are flowers was also nominated for Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. Congratulations to all nominated writers and books! And thank you, Dawn, Sipho and Diane for your amazing contributions to short story writing and poetry.
For the full announcement of this year’s SALA winners, please see: “SALA announces 2024 winners” (LitNet)
Steven Boykey Sidley reviews ‘Inside your body there are flowers’ by Diane Awerbuck
There is a commercial hierarchy in publishing which marks where money is most easily and quickly made at a given moment in the zeitgeist – the industry keeps a close watch on these trends. After all publishing companies need to stay in business. Perhaps even make a profit or two.
So we have forensic crime or romcom or up-lit or immigrant stories or sci-fi or light mystery or historical dramas or fantasy or erotica all battling for their moment in the sun. Which is often duly afforded them from time to time by the changing dictates of public taste.
But there are a few genres which, if they are lucky to be published at all, generally languish sad and neglected at the bottom of the revenue table and at the back of the bookstore. We all know which they are, because we so rarely buy them.
They are short stories and poetry.
I read short stories only occasionally. The most recent was Lauren Groff’s Florida and I remarked in a review that I posted at the time that a short story is it’s own microscope. Every word, every sentence, every phrase must count towards a 4 or 9 or 14 page plotlet. Every ounce of fat must be pared, only muscle must remain – lean, strong, compressed. Its fuel is its scarcity of on-page real estate.
And so, this collection by Diane Awerbuck. The difficulty in writing a cohesive review about short stories is often their spread; one cannot possibly cover each story in a collection. Even so, there are things to be said.
The first is that Awerbuck is an astonishingly good wordsmith, forging sentences and phrases dripping with allusion and dimensionality or just the music of finely wrought language. Part of joy in reading this book is to read a sentence, stop, savour, and go back and read that one sentence again, its effect amplified by the repetition.
This alone is worth the price of admission, but the stories themselves bear commentary. Some of the characters in the stories overlap and drag the reader through time. An insecure and barely post-pubescent teenager meeting a bunch of army boys on a train, [almost] losing her virginity some years later in another, sinking into the grief of the spurned lover in another, wrestling the certainty of a dread disease in another, communing with her late father long lost to suicide in another.
There are individual stand-alone stories too, an unlikely lust-soaked love story in 19th century Fish Hoek, a larger-than-life celebrity corpse on display in a funeral home and the kind attentions lavished on it by the mortuary make-up technician, a story of sin and redemption attending a death in a Karroo farmhouse.
Threading through this entire collection are commentaries around the big themes of a life closely examined – love, sex, death, meaning, family, self – each buried in stories that bring something new to these well-worn territories; a surprise (sometimes gentle, sometimes shocking) stalks every plot.
(There is the whiff of autobiography in many of the stories, some of which are borne out in the acknowledgements, which have the effect of wanting to have a wine-drenched dinner with the author to probe further.)
If you have not ever bought a short story collection, or have bought just a few, do yourself this favour and buy Inside your body there are flowers. And after you have finished this gorgeous outing spare a moment of gratitude for those publishers who bet the commercially impossible odds on books like these, simply just because it strikes them as the right thing to do (Karina Szczurek at Karavan Press in this case, others mentioned in Awerbuck’s acknowledgments).
Karavan Press at the Kingsmead Book Fair 2024
We are all looking forward to the next Kingsmead Book Fair, taking place at Kingsmead College on Saturday, 25 May 2024. Hope to see you there!
09:30-10:30 | Mackenzie 2
Dawn Garisch (What Remains) confirms, with Diane Awerbuck (Inside your body there are flowers), Frankie Murrey (Everyone Dies: A Series), Alex Latimer (Love Stories for Ghosts), and Barbara Ludman (Moving On), that brevity is the soul of wit. And drama. And romance.
09:30-10:30 | Mackenzie 3
Fiona Snyckers (The Hidden) asks Owen Salmon (A Weakness to Die For) and Andrew Brown (The Bitterness of Olives) to unpack the male gaze in storytelling.
12:30 – 13:30 | Music Centre
Georgina Geddes asks Alistair Mackay (The Child), Craig Higginson (The Ghost of Sam Webster), Shubnum Khan (The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil) and Amy Heydenrych (Bad Luck Penny) what it is that makes stories ‘literary’.
12:30 – 13:30 | Chapel
Diane Awerbuck (Inside your body there are flowers) answers the call of nature with Adam Welz (The End of Eden), and Nick Norman (The Woodpecker Mystery: The Inevitability of the Improbable).
12:30 – 13:30 | Mornington
Kate Sidley (Katie Gayle – Julia Bird Mysteries) asks Saaleha Bhamjee (Home Scar), Anna Stroud (Who Looks Inside) and Janine Jellars (When the Filter Fades) what it takes to really own your writing space as a woman.
14:30 – 15:30 | Mornington
Amy Heydenrych (Chasing Marian, Bad Luck Penny) sees if she can find a reason why the characters created by Ashling McCarthy (Down at Jika Jika Tavern), Marina Auer (Double Edged), Femi Kayode (Gaslight) and Natalie Conyer (Present Tense) need to worry about their welfare.
16:00 – 17:00 | Lange Hall
Police reservist Andrew Brown (The Bitterness of Olives) guides Daniel Steyn (The Thabo Bester Story), Naledi Shange (Killer Cop – The Rosemary Ndlovu Story), Karl Kemp (Why We Kill: Mob Justice and the New Vigilantism in South Africa) and Nechama Brodie (Domestic Terror) into the minds of murderers both famous and anonymous.
16:00 – 17:00 | Music Centre
Alex Latimer (Love Stories for Ghosts) discovers if the future is fantastic or frightening with Mandla Moyo (The Fallen Angel), Sarah M Naidoo (A Remedy for Death), Alistair Mackay (The Child) and Babette Gallard (Future Imperfect).
Full programme:
KBF 2024
Tickets:
Webtickets
Karavan Press at the FLF 2024
The Franschhoek Literary Festival – 17 to 19 May – is just around the corner and it promises to be another exciting literary adventure. We are thrilled to be involved. You can listen to and meet Karavan Press at the following events:
FRIDAY
11:30-12:30 | [6] THE SOLACE OF STORY
OLD SCHOOL HALL
When the world is falling apart, a novel can help. John Maytham digs into the empathetic and cathartic power of fiction with Andrew Brown, whose new thriller, The Bitterness of Olives, is set against the backdrop of the Israel–Palestine crisis; and with Ian Sutherland, whose new historical novel Catastrophe deals with the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986.
13:00-14:15 | [18] THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID (Screening)
FRANSCHHOEK THEATRE
Natasha Sutherland’s inventive documentary begins by observing the making of a stage adaptation of Tracy Going’s book Brutal Legacy, in which she reveals her past experience of abusive relationships. It then documents the frank conversations that follow between members of the audience. A powerful social dialogue about men, women and violence.
14:30-15:30 | [26] GOOD THINGS IN SMALL PACKAGES
COUNCIL CHAMBERS
In an age of attention deficits, short fiction is in demand. Diane Awerbuck (Inside Your Body There Are Flowers) discusses the nuts and bolts of the form with three writers: Troy Onyango (For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings), Frankie Murrey (Everyone Dies) and Dawn Garisch (What Remains).
16:00-17:00 | [32] TURNING THE TIDE
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
Anti-GBV awareness campaigns are not stopping the war waged on women by violent men. What will? How will the codes of South African masculinity be rewritten? Tracy Going (Brutal Legacy) speaks to Andy Kawa (Kwanele, Enough!) and Joy Watson (Striving for Social Equity).
SATURDAY
10:00-11:00 | [47] A HOME IS NOT A HOUSE (Screening)
FRANSCHHOEK THEATRE
Written by Lester Walbrugh (Elton Baatjies) and directed by Earl Kopeledi, this short film is a bold exploration of Cape Town’s class and race chasms – and the weight of personal histories. Three homeless people are tasked with retrieving a hard drive from a beachside bungalow. They stick around to luxuriate, but then it gets complicated …
Lester Walbrugh and Earl Kopeledi will give a short Q&A after the screening.
13:00-14:00 | [61] THE GRIM READER
CHURCH HALL
“No two people ever read the same book”, reckoned literary critic Edmund Wilson. Even so, a writer’s imaginary reader can become a singular presence — one that variously needs to be defied, satisfied, seduced or erased. 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards winner, C.A. Davids (How to Be a Revolutionary) swaps notes on readers with Karen Jennings (Crooked Seeds), Ivan Vladislavić (The Near North) and Craig Higginson (The Ghost of Sam Webster).
13:00-14:00 | [64] SIGNS OF A STRUGGLE
HOSPICE HALL
Sponsored by Pam Golding Properties
Thobeka Yose (In Silence My Heart Speaks) tells Sara-Jayne Makwala King about her experience of parenting a transgender child – and of understanding her child’s attempted suicide. How can parents of teenagers recognise a crisis, and fight the transphobia that inhibits teens from seeking help?
14:30-15:30 | [71] IN THE THIRST PERSON
CHURCH HALL
Having good sex is apparently easier than writing good sex scenes. But that’s not rocket science, surely? Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane juggles the ins and outs of high-end lit smut with Busisekile Khumalo (Sunshine and Shadows), Joy Watson (The Other Me) and Kobby Ben Ben (No One Dies Yet).
SUNDAY
10:00-11:00 | [88] THE WRITE THERAPIST
OLD SCHOOL HALL
Sewela Langeni gathers three writers who have grappled with personal trauma: memoirists Thobeka Yose (In Silence My Heart Speaks) and Margie Orford (Love and Fury); and Megan Choritz in Lost Property, a work of fiction. Does the ordeal of writing a painful history dispel the pain, and how?
10:00-11:00 | [92] STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
HOSPICE HALL
Sponsored by Pam Golding Properties
Claustrophobic tensions drive the acclaimed new novels by Booker long-listed Karen Jennings (whose Crooked Seeds proceeds from the discovery of human remains on a family’s land) and Nick Mulgrew (whose Tunnel traps a random group of travellers in a Cape highway tunnel). Both of these taut literary thrillers conjure unnerving versions of South African reality. Karina Szczurek will ask them to dig deep.
11:30-12:30 | [96] HOW TO GRIP
CHURCH HALL
Being unputdownable is a delicious dream for most fiction writers, but a rare knack. Still, some of the narrative tricks that make for a one-sitting read can be acquired, as Danielle Weakley learns when speaking with Femi Kayode (Gaslight), Fiona Snyckers (The Hidden) and Nick Mulgrew (Tunnel).
For the full programme, click here:
FLF 2024
Tickets:
Webtickets
Diane Awerbuck, Dawn Garisch and Frankie Murrey at Liberty Books
We launched three short story collections at Liberty Books last night: Diane Awerbuck (Inside your body there are flowers), Dawn Garisch (What Remains) and Frankie Murrey (Everyone Dies) were in conversation with Christy Weyer and spoke about the genre, about their individual stories and about what it means to be a writer. It was a magical treat to listen to the three amazing writers in the beautiful space of Christy’s literary cathedral, Liberty Books. Cleo made an appearance, of course, but decided to stay out of the Q&A action this time.
Thank you to the Authors, to Christy and to all who attended! Can’t wait to see you all again next week for the launch of The Bitterness of Olives by Andrew Brown.
karavanpress.com 