You can find my 2 new poems here, on the Big Bridge site. One of them is about a writer that a lot of people seem to love to hate, judging by the column inches (screen inches?).
Yes, this is still scary! I’m back in the classroom, fixed by his beady eye…
The end of July / beginning of August was a very happy chunk of time for me. The news about the Ingrid Jonker prize reached me on 5 August by the kind (behind the scenes) offices of Rustum — which by now is old news. The previous week, though, I’d heard about a book I’d been closely involved with winning a completely different kind of prize.
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Oxford University Press Southern Africa needs to contact Grace Maguri in connection with her short story “The Blue Bible”, which was published online by Crossing Borders: New Writing from Africa No. 8.
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in the print media… and very nice of Darryl Accone it was too (15-21 August 2008). » read more
At the Book Lounge, Cape Town, at 18h00 for 18h30 on Thursday 21 August.
Finuala will be reading from her new collection, Notes from the Dementia Ward, and I’ll read from Fourth Child, with a few new poems thrown in. I’m not sure if Joan will read from Requiem but I’m looking forward to it, and hope to see some of you there.
In the LRB of 3 July 2008, Jenny Diski catalogues her encounters with various foul-opinioned South Africans, and expresses her disappointment at the fallen Rainbow nation (haven’t heard that phrase in a while…).
The ‘you can’t understand until you’ve lived there’ argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me understanding about apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14 years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was going to be there anyway – Cape Town was the end point of another journey – and I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks and look around; be a regular tourist in a place where minds had been changed.
(There’s more at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/disk01_.html)
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Fourth Child