South Africa

Introduction

2018 opened on a sad note, with the death of South Africa’s Poet Laureate Kearopetse Kgositsile in January. During the course of the year, we also lost novelists Peter Temple and Rose Zwi. In September, at the annual South African Literary Awards Mongane Wally Serote was announced as the new Poet Laureate. Kelwyn Sole received the Poetry Award for his 2017 collection Walking, Falling and Jeff Opland and Peter Mtuze won the Literary Translators Award for translating the collected poems of John Solilo.

No collected poems were published in 2018; however, Finuala Dowling’s Pretend You Don’t Know Me brings together a selection of poems from her previous four collections. Gabeba Baderoon won the Elizabeth Eybers Prize for Poetry for her highly praised fourth collection, The History of Intimacy. Kyle Allan was appointed editor of New Coin poetry magazine and had his second collection The Space between Us published.

A new feminist publisher, Impepho Press, appeared, with collections by Vangile Gantsho, Sarah Godsell and Danai Mupotso. Impressive debut collections came from Saaleha Idrees Bamjee, Jessica Denyschen, Busisiwe Mahlangu, Stuart Payne, Megan Ross, Henk Rossouw and Annette Snyckers. Karen Jennings, who has previously published fiction and memoir, has now produced a fine poetry collection. She is not the only poet to cross genres. John Eppel has two books listed this year, poetry and short stories, while Flow Wellington includes poems and stories in her collection.

Several strong collections appeared from established poets Jim Pascual Agustin, P. R. Anderson, Christine Muller Coates, C. J. Driver, Kerry Hammerton, Maakomela Manaka, Maishe Maponya, Stephen Symons and Tony Ullyat. Although Mark Swift died in 2013, his brother, Adam Swift, has brought out a final collection of his poems, appropriately titled Unfinished Business.

Agustin and Eppel highlight one of the challenges of compiling a bibliography such as this — determining what makes someone a South African writer. Eppel was born and raised in South Africa but now lives in Zimbabwe, while Agustin is from the Phillipines, where the book was published, but has been living in South Africa since 1994. When in doubt I have erred on the side of inclusion.

Neil Coppen’s play NewFoundLand was highly praised when produced in 2017, including an award for best debut production and a nomination for best script at the 2017 KKNK Arts Festival. The play focuses on the intertwining lives and dreams of two South African men trying to escape their conservative upbringings and is an exploration of sexuality, love and loneliness in contemporary South Africa. Coppen has a second play, in collaboration with Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mtombeni, using a process they have dubbed “Empatheatre” to share stories in order to encourage empathy. Writing as “The Big Brotherhood” their play Ulwembu (“spider’s web” in isiZulu) looks at the those caught up in the web of a highly addictive, toxic drug in KwaMashu, near Durban. Athol Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is inspired by the life of a self-taught outsider artist who painted the rocks on the farm on which he worked. Set during apartheid, and then afterwards, the play explores different experiences of racism; of the artist and his young protégé.

The fiction is particularly strong this year, with noteworthy new novels from Imraan Coovadia, Maire Fisher, Maya Fowler, Craig Higginson, Cynthia Jele, Kirsten Miller, Nthikeng Mohlele, Claire Robertson, Mark Winkler and Eben Venter. There are many impressive debut novels, most notably from N. R. Brodie, Carol Gibbs, Barry Gilder, Clare Houston, John Hunt, Mphuthumi Ndabeni, Siphiwe Ndlovu, Vincent Pienaar and Rahla Xenopolous, several of whom were nominated for literary awards.

The Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction was won by Niq Mhlongo for Soweto, under the Apricot Tree, with The Hum of the Sun by Kirsten Miller and The Ones with Purpose by Cynthia Jele shortlisted. Jele’s novel was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Award, along with The Boy Who Could Keep a Swan in His Head by John Hunt, The Theory of Flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, Under Glass by Claire Robertson and Theo & Flora by Mark Winkler. The winner has not been announced at the time of writing.

South African authors were well-represented in awards for African literature. Stacey Hardy was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. The Short Story Day Africa and Gerald Kraak awards both featured several South African authors in the anthologies of the best of the entries. The Nommo Awards for African speculative fiction shortlisted Cynthia Zinn, Blaize Kaye and Tiah Beautement for individual short stories, Empty Monsters by Cat Hellisen, Knucklebone by Nechama Brodie, The Strange by Masha du Toit and A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia for best novel and The Firebird by Nerine Dorman and Neid-Fire by Caldon Mull for novellas.

Speculative fiction features strongly, with some authors blending speculative fiction with thrillers. N. R. Brodie’s Knucklebone is a crime thriller set in contemporary Johannesburg, where an investigation into a housebreaking gone wrong leads to an occult underworld of witches and sangomas. Imraan Coovadia’s A Spy in Time is set in the far future, after a supernova has devastated most of the world, the mining tunnels under Johannesburg providing refuge and leaving it one of the only surviving cities. A secret agency sends its spies back through time in an effort to prevent a mysterious enemy from causing further disasters. Frank Owen is the pen name for Dianne Awerbuck and Alex Latimer. North, the sequel to South, is set in an alternate America devastated by a civil war, plagued by viruses released as chemical weapons and with the northern and southern states separated by a wall. Interestingly the first novel was written before walls became a feature of American politics. Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar is an alternate reality where the Jewish state was not created in Palestine but in Africa in the early 20^th century.

Rahla Xenopoulos draws on Jewish mythology in The Season of Glass, with the theme of twins being recurrently born in different times through history, with the power to change history. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight is set in an unnamed African country and incorporates elements of magical realism in its account of the life of the main character and her family, from colonial times to the present.

If some authors look to the future, many look back at the past, with historical fiction and novels which move between the past and present dominating. Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s The Broken River Tent moves between the 19^th century and present day. A young Xhosa man is visited by the spirit of Maqoma, a Xhosa chief at the forefront of fighting British colonialism in the Eastern Cape. Clare Houston’s The Unquiet Place follows a woman who finds a diary from a young Afrikaans girl in a concentration camp during the South African War. Her obsession with finding the history of the young girl leads to her uncovering more recent secrets and a land haunted by its history. In Mark Winkler’s Theo & Flora it is letters rather than a diary which triggers a connection with the past. A writer discovers a box of letters in his house dating back to 1944, between a lawyer named Theo and his mistress, Flora. Although he had been asked to destroy the letters by his ex-wife, they spark an idea for a novel. Maya Fowler’s Patagonia moves between the present time and the early 19^th century, following the stories of a disgraced university lecturer and his great-grandfather, who each flee to Argentina, for different reasons.

All Things Bright and Broken by Carol Gibbs is set in Cape Town in the 1940s, seen through the eyes of a young girl from a chaotic family. At times nostalgic and humorous, the story gains darker undertones as apartheid takes hold and abuse is revealed. John Hunt’s The Boy Who Could Keep a Swan in His Head is set in 1960s Johannesburg. A young boy dealing with a difficult situation finds his escape in books and a friendship with a hobo who calls himself Heb Thirteen Two and might just be an angel. Under Glass is Claire Robertson’s third historical novel and follows a young Englishwoman who arrives in Port Natal from India in 1857 to make a new life for her family among settlers, sugar-cane farmers and indentured labourers. The novel deals with family secrets as well as showing the region’s colonial history. Parts Unknown by Zirk van den Berg is set in German South-West Africa in 1905, following the intersecting stories of five characters whose lives intertwine.

More recent history is covered by Barry Gibbs in The List, a novel of espionage, politics and betrayal. Moving from the struggle years to the present to the near future, where the narrator is in a second exile, it follows a group of veterans of MK, of ANC intelligence and of the post-apartheid intelligence service, who are formed into a secret task team to investigate rumours of apartheid-era spies in the government. The Gold Diggers by Sue Nyathi is set in 2008 and follows a group of Zimbabweans on a treacherous expedition to Johannesburg, in search of a better life.

In Tony Peake’s North Facing a man in his sixties looks back on his youth in 1960s Pretoria, haunted by an act of betrayal from his school years, which has had a shattering aftermath. Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives is an updated epistolary novel, told through emails between a middle-aged South African woman living in Australia and the older man who had been her mentor decades earlier. A troubled relationship and complex histories are explored in the renewed exchange after a long estrangement.

Green as the Sky Is Blue is Eben Venter’s first novel written in English rather than translated from Afrikaans. Focused on an exiled Afrikaans writer in Australia who is haunted by his past in South Africa, it explores memory, sexuality and identity. Venter is one of several novelists looking at writers or the act of writing. In The White Room Craig Higginson reimagines and expands his 2010 play The Girl in the Yellow Dress. The novel moves between contemporary London and Paris in the early 2000s focusing on a South African playwright who has invited her former lover to the opening of the play she has written about their troubled relationship. Higginson explores language, identity, memory, loss and love. The Last Sentence by Tumelo Buthelezi depicts a once-successful scriptwriter who now struggles with writer’s block, substance abuse, anxiety and depression as he starts to lose his tenuous grip on reality. Too Many Tsunamis by Vincent Pienaar is a darkly humorous account of a struggling, depressed writer whose suicide note is turning into an epic piece of writing.

Michael K by Nthikeng Mohlele is a response to Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee. Mohlele’s central character, who sees himself as a poet, spends much time thinking and talking about writing but never writes, meets Michael K and becomes obsessed with his life and meaning, especially when he discovers that a famous writer has written a book about him and, even, that books have been written about that book. Coetzee makes a brief appearance in the novel, at the funeral of Michael K. Appropriately for a novel speaking back to Coetzee, Michael K encompasses intertextuality and metafiction. Mohelele’s main character is also mourning his father, with several novels depicting grief, loss and difficult family dynamics.

The Ones with Purpose by Cynthia Jele explores the death of the narrator’s sister from breast cancer. Complex family relationships, sacrifice, betrayal, forgiveness and love are woven into the personal grief and mourning rituals demanded by the community. Called to Song by Kharnita Mohamed explores grief and betrayal as a woman mourning her mother faces the breakdown of her marriage. Ijangolet Ogwang’s An Image in the Mirror is the story of twins growing up in two different worlds. A new mother in rural Uganda sends one of her twin daughters to South Africa to be raised by her sister. The young women grow up each resenting the other for her life. Kagiso Lesego Molope’s Such a Lonely, Lovely Road shows two young men finding love and navigating the difficult terrain of race, sexuality, homophobia, family and community expectations.

The Enumerations by Mairé Fisher focuses on a young man with obsessive compulsive disorder and explores the impact of mental illness on the sufferers and their families. Kirsten Miller has written non-fiction about autism. In The Hum of the Sun she shows a teenage boy left to care for his younger autistic brother. After the death of their mother and sister the brothers journey to the city in search of their father.

S. A. Partridge won the MER Prize for Youth Literature for Mine, a strong but bleak account of two teenage misfits each convinced they are unlovable. Their unlikely romance could provide some sort of salvation but ends up tearing them apart. Partidge tends to portray troubled teens and this is no exception, with the novel depicting drugs and alcohol, abuse and teenage sexuality. Edyth Bulbring was shortlisted for the MER Prize for The Reject, a powerful post-apocalyptic sequel to her 2014 novel The Mark. Bulbring mixes fantastical elements with the futuristic setting as the main character bears the weight of a prophecy that her return will bring freedom to her people or destroy them all, a doom that is set in motion by a sentient AI being. Bulbring has a second novel, also a sequel. Snitch 2: A Year of Relative Madness is a humorous story of contemporary life focusing on a 16-year-old boy.

Mary Watson’s first youth novel The Wren Hunt, nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards for Teen/Young Adult, has attracted comparisons to Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle. Interestingly it has been praised for being an impressive debut by several reviewers clearly not aware of her award-winning adult fiction. Set in contemporary Ireland, where Watson now lives, the novel draws on Irish mythology and blends fantasy with thriller as a young woman is sent to infiltrate a rival magical group where she encounters danger, divided loyalties, family secrets and forbidden love.

Heart of Stone by Anathi Nyadu also explores family secrets, but against a backdrop of gang violence in contemporary South Africa. It is part of the Harmony High series, written by different authors but set in the same township school in Cape Town. When Morning Comes by Arusha Raina is historical fiction set against the backdrop of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Songbird and Other Stories brings together stories of contemporary teenage life.

An unusually large number of short story collections appeared. The most noteworthy came from Niq Mhlongo and Mohale Mashigo, both having produced several novels before bringing out short story collections. Mhlongo’s Soweto, under the Apricot Tree captures township life in Soweto while Mashigo’s Intruders is a collection of speculative fiction stories, moving between fantasy, magic realism and science fiction. Speculative fiction is a feature of other collections, most notably Learning How to Drown by Cat Hellisen and Relative Scale by Abi Godsell. Chatsworth is Pravasan Pillay’s debut collection and contains stories set in the Indian township of Chatsworth, Durban.

There were three posthumous collections, all with a strong regional focus. When Marion Baxter died in 2002, her stories had been published in journals but not in a book. Her son brings together a collection of her stories set in the Eastern Cape in Bitter Aloes. 2018 was the centenary of the birth of Guy Butler and saw a revised edition of his 1989 collection Tales from the Old Karoo. Marico Moon by Herman Charles Bosman is not a reissue of one collection but brings together 60 stories set in the Great Marico area. The stories have been adapted to remove racist terms in common use at the time of writing in the 1940s.

ID: New Short Fiction from Africa contains the stories longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa award. While containing stories from across Africa, six of the 20 authors are South African: Michael Yee, Kharys Laue, Lester Walbrugh, Mpho Phalwane, Susan Newham-Blake and Genna Gardini. As You Like It is the second volume of the now annual Gerald Kraak anthology of writing exploring gender, sexuality and social justice. It includes fiction, poetry, photography and essays from across Africa (although South Africans are in the majority) and was shortlisted for the 2019 LAMBDA Literary Awards for Literature about LGBTQI+ People. We Are No Longer at Ease: The Struggle for #Fees Must Fall is a collection of essays, poems and personal accounts from the countrywide student protests demanding affordable university education.

Despite its title, Absolute Africa contains poems by South Africans. Patricia Schonstein brings together poems from a wide range of poets which speak of, or are inspired by, Africa. Michael Chapman has brought out the third edition of The New Century of South African Poetry. First published in 1981 and then 2002, this edition adds a new section for the period from the year 2000 to the present as well as updating the older version. Over 100 new poems have been added, replacing a similar number from the old edition. Poems are arranged in date sections, moving from traditional poems from San to contemporary poets.

Two of the poetry anthologies emerged from competitions, both emphasizing the multilingual nature of South Africa. The Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology is the eighth anthology containing the longlisted poems in the annual competition. Poems can be submitted in any South African language, although all poems are translated into English. I Wish I’d Said came out of the AVBOB Poetry competition. Again, poems in all 11 official languages were eligible, with prizes for the best two poems in each language. The anthology contains the winning poems in each language, as well as seven commissioned poems with all poems appearing in English translation as well as the original language. The English competition was won by Caroline Archer, with Helen Moffett in second place.

Converse: Contemporary South African Poets in Translation contains poems translated between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Joan Hambidge is an award-winning Afrikaans poet whose works are now available in English. The Coroner’s Wife contains selected poems from her previous collection translated by poets Charl J. F. Cilliers, Johann de Lange, Jo Nel and Douglas Reid Skinner. Stitching a Whirlwind is a collection of classic poems in African languages, edited by Megan Hall, with translations by Nkosinathi Sithole, Biki Lepota, Samuel Tshepiso Mothibi, Antjie Krog, Fred Khumalo, David wa Maahlamela, Gabeba Baderoon, Loyiso Kevin Mletshe, Zukile Jama, Johannes Malefetsane Lenake, Thokozile Mabeqa, N. Saule, Stephen Masote and Rita Barnard. Each poem is given in the original language and English. This work is part of a translation project at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape which has resulted in a series of classic African literary works being made available in English. The Lawsuit of the Twins and Don Jadu, both by S. E. K. Mqhayi, first appeared in isiXhosa in 1914 and 1929. Sesotho is represented by Senkatana by S. M. Mofokeng, published in 1952 and Tears of the Brain by O. K. Matsepe, first published in 1968. The isiZulu texts have the greatest range, with B. W. Vilikazi’s 1935 No Matter When and the 1996 Home Is Nowhere by J. M. Mngadi.

The translations from Afrikaans are primarily crime fiction, with new novels from Karin Brynard and Deon Meyer. Irma Venter appears in English for the first time. Blue Sunday and Circus are stand-alone novels but are part of a series which shares characters. Interestingly each novel was translated by a different person. Willem Anker’s Red Dog is a historical novel of the Cape Frontier of the late 18^th century.

Author, archivist and literary critic Karel Schoeman’s final book before his death in 2017 appeared in translation as At Close of Day, a memoir and meditation on aging. Memoirs also appeared from authors Pieter Dirk Uys, Wilbur Smith and Karin Cronje, while Christopher Hope, Lesego Malepe and Zukiswa Wanner produced personal accounts of travel. Justify the Enemy: Becoming Human in South Africa is a collection of non-fiction writing from Zakes Mda, including public lectures, essays, interviews and media articles. The essays explore writing and creativity as well as focusing on human rights, politics and the environment.

Karina Magdalina Szczurek has brought out a collection of love letters between herself and her late husband André Brink. A 2017 collection of letters between Brink and poet Ingrid Jonker, Flame in the Snow won the Sol Plaatje Translation award for translators Leon de Kock and Karin Schimke. On the centenary of his birth, a collection of letters written by Nelson Mandela while in prison was released. 1918 is also remembered in In a Time of Plague a collection of personal accounts of the 1918 flu epidemic. The book is one of two from the Van Riebeeck Society, who produce books using historical documents. The second book is Hendrik Swellengrebel in Africa: Journals of Three Journeys in 1776–1777, edited and introduced by Gerrit Schutte, an 18^th-century travel diary in Dutch, translated into English.

Iconic early travel writer François Levaillant’s life and legacy is explored by Ian Glenn in The First Safari: Searching for François Levaillant. Brian Willan has written extensively on Sol Plaatje, including a 1984 biography. His Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932 is a substantial new work, drawing on 30 years of research and criticism. Plaatje’s contemporary Olive Schreiner is the subject of an impressive study Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Post-Colonial Writing by Jade Ong. Dan Wylie has brought out the first book-length study of poet Sydney Clouts (1926–1981). Poetic Bodies and Corpses of War by Gerhard Genis is an examination of the South African poetry of World War I.

Other noteworthy books of criticism are Postcolonial Poetics: 21^st Century Critical Readings by Elleke Boehmer, South African Gothic: Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Postapartheid Imagination and Beyond by Rebecca Duncan and Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing, edited by Felicity Hand and Esther Pujolràs-Noguer. Eco-criticism is a strong feature of the criticism, with several articles, a book, Death and Compassion: The Elephant in Southern African Literature by Dan Wylie, and a special issue of the journal Tydskrif vir Letterkunde on Dogs in South African Literatures edited by Dan Wylie and Joan-Mari Barendse.