Writing

We express who we are through writing.

  • The world is bigger than the literary canon

    The lists of “100 Authors to Read Before Graduation” and the “50 Classics All School Learners Should Read” I came across recently compel me to reply to those who compile them. There is something faintly absurd about a list called “The 100 Greatest Authors of All Time” that contains 20 or 30 writers from Britain…

    Read more →

  • American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has been named the winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize – the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for writers aged 39 and under – for her debut poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name. Selected unanimously by this year’s judging panel, the collection traces the turbulent, often…

    Read more →

  • There is a quiet moment that comes before any serious act of writing. It is not the moment of inspiration, as it is often described. Not a sudden idea or a clear sentence forming fully in the mind. It is something slower, less certain. A kind of hesitation. The recognition that there is something you…

    Read more →

  • South Africa can claim to have some of the best writers around. From books on motherhood to shattering exposes of the country’s colonial and racist past, from stories on the history of the Kruger National Park to the social movement creating a “pink line” around the planet, there is much to celebrate, even in the…

    Read more →

  • Kofifi was a thriving place of light and dark, of hopes and dreams, and ultimately of thwarted lives and loss. And writer, journalist and philosopher Can Themba, fitted right in. Daniel Canodoise Themba, who was born in Pretoria’s Marabastad on 21 June 1924, was a charismatic writer bursting with talent in a country that went…

    Read more →