The book is set in a time of darkness: power outages and COVID-19.
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The South African novelist messes with the line between fiction and non-fiction.
Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons
The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.
Lerato Mogoatlhe is the author of Vagabond.
Courtesy Lerato Mogoatlhe
The solo journey of a queer, black woman across the continent makes fascinating reading.
I Write Into the Yawning Void is Magona’s new book, released in the year she turns 80. Björn Rudner.
Björn Rudman
From domestic worker to matriarch of South African literature, the book is a reflection on her writing journey.
Detail of a photo of Frank Anthony (front left) on Robben Island with Walter Sisulu (front right).
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The activist and writer has been erased from South Africa’s history - but new academic work seeks to restore his voice.
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Challenging myths about heterosexual white South African men, Prinsloo published four books of short stories in 12 years.
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Buys, the award-winning novel by Willem Anker, uses lines without credit from the Irish writer - not the first such literary controversy it has raised.
Detail of a photo of Can Themba at Drum magazine.
Photo Jürgen Schadeberg courtesy Wits University Press
Abundantly talented and flawed, apartheid-era writer Can Themba wasn’t afraid to put his body on the line for a story.
Academic and author Pumla Dineo Gqola in 2010.
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Female Fear Factory by Pumla Dineo Gqola sees gender violence as a sophisticated ecosystem kept alive by socially manufactured fear.
Portrait of a Lesotho shepherd, Ntoaesele Mashongoane.
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Set in the music wars of Lesotho, the new novel by the South African author tells of a wandering minstrel whose hit song leads to his downfall.
A masked herdsman in Lesotho.
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Lesotho’s famo music is known for the use of accordions - and gang violence. In Wayfarers’ Hymns, Zakes Mda explores this tradition.
Damon Galgut at a photocall for this year’s Booker Prize in London.
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Will white South Africa ever give up part of its privilege? This is the contentious issue at the heart Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel.
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For parents, skin colour is often a difficult subject and dealing with it through storytelling can be a useful aid.
Sindiwe Magona at home.
© Bjorn Rudner/Courtesy Sindiwe Magona
A literary icon, her autobiographies offer a way of understanding the country’s brutal past in order to heal and move forward.
A statue of the author, Solomon T. Plaatje, in Kimberley, South Africa.
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According to a new book, the friendships among women in the novel reveal its author Sol T. Plaatje’s view of effective political struggle.
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In each of his novels, he explored questions that shifted South Africa’s cultural debates, especially about memory and race.
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The artist’s body of work, through its very public focus on queer masculinity, offers alternative ways of thinking about what being a man is.
A younger Dennis Brutus, president of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee in Montreal, Canada in 1976.
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That none of his collections were published in apartheid South Africa testifies to the police state’s censorship.
Keorapetse Kgositsile with US author Alice Walker, 1996.
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A study of the late Keorapetse Kgositsile shows how the poet influenced black American culture. It also shows how his mother and his grandmother’s oral traditions in turn influenced him.
Flowcomm/Flickr/Sol Plaatje House Museum
The life and work of seminal South African writer, intellectual and politician Sol Plaatje seems more relevant than ever. We look into some of the latest scholarly inquiry.