Sometimes, she says, when we are afraid that our own narratives are at risk of being erased, we stop investigating history, and risk becoming stagnant in the process. That is why we have an obligation to keep on interrogating the past as fully as we are able to. If there is a lesson to be had in An Island (I hasten to add that, to the story’s credit, it doesn’t trade in easy morals), it is that this obligation never comes to an end. We cannot, like Samuel, retreat to our little enclaves of memory and build walls to keep out the world. Even those of us battling ghosts from the past — and maybe especially those of us battling ghosts from the past — need to keep our noses to the wind, to the strange new forms of relation blowing in from distant shores.
Daily Maverick
AN ISLAND by Karen Jennings shortlisted for the K. SELLO DUIKER MEMORIAL LITERARY AWARD
It gives us great joy to announce that An Island by Karen Jennings has been shortlisted for the K. SELLO DUIKER MEMORIAL LITERARY AWARD in the South African Literary Awards (SALA).
The shortlist also includes Lihle Sokapase’s Yapatyalaka Ibhobhile (isiXhosa) and Brian Fredericks’s As die Cape Flats kon praat (Afrikaans).
Congratulations to all shortlisted authors in this and all other categories!
‘It took the Booker to introduce South Africans to their own Karen Jennings’, writes Jean Meiring
This year’s discovery, though, is Jennings (born 1982), who, in spite of having produced several excellent earlier books, has not been afforded the acclaim in South Africa that she deserves. The truth of the hoary adage that a prophet is rarely hallowed in her own land rings especially true, it would seem, of South Africans who write literary fiction in English.
[…]
Whether Jennings’ name appears on the shortlist that will be announced in London tomorrow afternoon or not, one can only hope that her longlisting will have changed the trajectory of her career: that she will never again have to make out a case to be published. And never again be published in print runs of only 500.
LitNet
On Being a Writer in Kalk Bay
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.
A FRACTURED LAND by MELISSA A. VOLKER longlisted for the Page Turner Award – Book Award 2021!
Fantastic news! Melissa A. Volker’s A Fractured Land has been longlisted for the Page Turner Award – Book Award 2021.
Melissa A. Volker is a reader, writer, beauty therapist and water woman. She blogs about surfing and stand up paddle boarding; writes eco-fiction, romance and short stories. She lives in Cape Town with her husband, two daughters and a cat. Her first eco-romantic thriller, A Fractured Land, was published in the US in 2018 and was republished along with her second novel, Shadow Flicker, by Karavan Press in South Africa in 2019. Shadow Flicker won the Romance Writers Organisation of South Africa’s Strelitzia prize for the most promising manuscript in 2017. Melissa’s short story, ‘Spa Ritual’, was published in the South African anthology: Hair – Weaving and Unpicking Stories of Identity. Her new novelette, The Pool Guy, is coming soon.
Congratulations, Melissa!
Moira Lovell reviews FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT by Stephen Symons in the latest issue of STANZAS
“The thirty-six poems and prose passages that make up Symons’ new collection reveal the tender, sensitive and incisive vision of the writer.”
“Wide-ranging, Symons’ work is both delicate and weighty. Full of subtleties and surprises, it arrests and engages the reader.”
FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT by STEPHEN SYMONS
John Self reviews An Island by Karen Jennings
This is a book that gives us faith that the Booker prize judges are doing their job, for two reasons. The first is that this is the dark horse of the longlist, released quietly by a micro-publisher, unreviewed in the press until now, so it shows the judges aren’t just guided by big names.
An Island is the third novel by Karen Jennings, a South African novelist living in Brazil. It throws us into the world of Samuel, a lighthouse keeper who has withdrawn from the world and whose main concerns are looking after his chickens and maintaining his toenails. Oh, and occasionally he harvests corpses — refugees, others — who wash up on his shores. Unfortunately for Samuel, the 33rd dead body to arrive in his 23 years on the island turns out, despite his hopes, not to be dead after all.
The Times
karavanpress.com 