Announcing: Prunings, by Helen Moffett

uHlanga are proud to announce our latest release: Prunings, by Helen Moffett. This chapbook/collection hybrid presents some of our most experimental and performative poetry yet, from one of South African literature's most prolific editorial forces.

Where do unfinished poems go – the early buds, the offcuts, all of the blooms that can't be bunched together? In this beguiling bouquet of travel poetry, diary fragments, letters, works-in-progress and retrospection, Helen Moffett offers us a rare look into the workings, misfirings and triumphs of a literary mind. A collection of tentative moments and emotions, rendered in fleeting and experimental forms.

Helen Moffett was born in Pretoria in 1961. A poet, editor, feminist activist and academic, her publications include university textbooks, an anthology of landscape writings, a cricket book (with the late Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes), and the Girl Walks In erotica series (with Sarah Lotz and Paige Nick under the nom de plume Helena S. Paige). Her first poetry collection, Strange Fruit, was published by our friends at Modjaji Books in 2009. She lives in Noordhoek.

With an unfinished cover illustration by the late botanical artist Ellaphie Ward-Hilhorst, this is a collection that embodies the trials and small victories of being a writer; the side of a poet and creative mind that few people ever see.

Prunings will be released in September 2016, for sale through bookstores throughout South Africa, and elsewhere from the African Books Collective.

Thabo Jijana wins 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize; Genna Gardini wins Commendation

uHlanga is thrilled to announce that Thabo Jijana’s Failing Maths and My Other Crimes is the winner of the 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry – South Africa's most prestigious poetry award – with Genna Gardini's collection, Matric Rage, given special commendation. Both collections were part of the uHlanga New Poets series in 2015.

The Ingrid Jonker Prize committee's release states:

In a fiercely-contested struggle among seven eligible volumes, Jijana’s debut emerged victorious. Jijana was championed by one judge in particular, who described his debut, with its ‘subtle, wry and memorable title’, as ‘a rich and satisfying collection where, unusually, every poem strikes something hard and vital.’  The judge went on to remark that ‘Jijana has a painterly way with the image, capturing in impossibly few words a picture that does most of the poem’s outer work, so that the poet himself can get on with what it is he is trying to say’. 
The judge observed that ‘while the self is – in any enquiring poet’s obsessions – an important project, what emerges here is not the self as the bull’s eye, but the self as link – between histories, times, generations and people’.
Gardini’s debut was singled out for her ‘lyrical-experimental imagination’ which contributes to the ‘edginess’ and ‘sexiness’ of the poems and their ‘wonderfully varied scenarios’.
This year’s judges were Karin Schimke, Jim Pascual Agustin and Professor Sally-Ann Murray. Judges of the Ingrid Jonker prize are unaware of one another’s identities until judging is complete.

uHlanga would like to thank the Ingrid Jonker Prize committee and judges for this vindicating, thrilling and humbling honour for us and our two poets. We'd also like to congratulate Modjaji Books' Elisa Galgut, who also won a Commendation for The Attribute of Poetry.

The 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry will be handed over at the Franschhoek Literary Festival on Saturday 14 May at 17.15 in the Council Chamber. This is a free event, at which uHlanga poets will be reading. For media enquiries, please email nick at uhlangapress dot co dot za.

Announcing: Questions for the Sea by Stephen Symons

This is a place
conceived by bone

uHlanga is proud to announce our next release: Questions for the Sea by Stephen Symons.

Lyrical and lachrymose, Stephen Symon's debut collection voyages into the unknowable depths of ocean and adulthood. In gorgeous, flowing verse, Symons gives in to the currents of love, war, parenthood and childhood; and, above all, a collection infused with an all-encompassing awe for the power and mystery of the natural world.

Stephen Symons was born in Cape Town in 1966. An avid surfer, his writing has been published in journals, magazines and various anthologies throughout South Africa. He holds a masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town and is currently working on a PhD in African Studies that focuses of the experiences of ex-SADF conscripts. Currently, Stephen lives in Cape Town, where he works as a lecturer and graphic designer.

Questions for the Sea is set to be released in June 2016.