Announcing Milk Fever by Megan Ross

uHlanga is happy to announce the imminent release and launch of Milk Fever, the debut collection by East London writer Megan Ross.

In an extraordinary debut, Megan Ross writes the uneasy truths about unexpected motherhood and all its emotional detritus. In deftly and experimentally navigating the angst, joy and self-reckoning that comes with the choices and misadventures of young womanhood, this is a collection that brings together the evocative with the provocative, and the feminist with the personal, in a bold and startling poetic style. Hallucinatory, image-wet, and navigating the eternal tides of spirit and body, Milk Fever is a chimeric dreamscape in which a woman reconfigures, remembers and rebirths herself.

Photo by Skye Cronje

Megan Ross, born in 1989, is a writer and poet from East London. She is the 2017 winner of the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction and an Iceland Writers Retreat alum. She was a runner-up for the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize and the 2017 National Arts Festival Short Sharp Stories Award. She lives near the Indian Ocean with her son and partner. Milk Fever is her first book.

The book, which releases May 2018, will be launched with a series of events in Cape Town, beginning with a launch at the Book Lounge on Monday 14 May, with Rachel Zadok. Megan will also be appearing at the Franschhoek Literary Festival that weekend. The book will then be launched in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng (dates and venues TBC).

With a beautiful cover collage by Taiwan-based artist, Leora Joy, this is a book striking both in form and content.

Stephen Symons wins honourable mention for 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry

Congratulations to uHlanga poet Stephen Symons for garnering an honourable mention for the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. His debut collection Questions for the Sea, published in 2016 by uHlanga, was lauded by judge John Keene as a “collection of finely crafted lyrical poems, offering revelatory glimpses into the lives of contemporary white, middle-class South Africans.”

The Glenna Luschei prize is one of the most important prizes for poetry from Africa:

The Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, funded by literary philanthropist and poet Glenna Luschei and the only pan-African book prize of its kind, promotes African poetry written in English or in translation by recognizing a significant book published each year by an African poet.

The 2017 award was won by Juliane Okot Bitek, born in Kenya to Ugandan parents, for her collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016). Timothy Ogene’s Descent & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2016) garnered the other honourable mention, alongside Symons' book.

View more about the prizewinners and the Glenna Luschei Prize at the African Poetry Book Fund website.

(Image courtesy of the Centre for Curating the Archive)

Announcing uHlanga’s Poets of 2018

We are proud to announce the upcoming publication in 2018 of collections by Megan Ross, Saaleha Idrees Bamjee, P.R. Anderson and Siphokazi Jonas.

In 2017, uHlanga’s South African chorus swelled. Celebrated poets Francine Simon, Douglas Reid Skinner and Koleka Putuma all published single-author collections to national and international acclaim, while our anthologies Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way and Imbewu Yesini amplified the voices of young local poets to the country at large.

We hope to continue sharing the work of daring, experimental South African writers with you, and thus we are thrilled to announce the poets who will be publishing with us in the coming year.

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Our 2018 lineup, in order of publication:

Megan Ross is a writer, poet and journalist from the Eastern Cape. She is winner of the 2016 Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, the 2017 Brittle Paper Award for Fiction and was second runner-up for the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship and longlisted for the Writivism Prize. Her forthcoming book with uHlanga, Milk Fever, will be her debut collection of poetry.
 

Saaleha Idrees Bamjee is a photographer and writer based in Johannesburg. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is the winner of the 2014 Writivism Short Story Prize. Her poetry has appeared in New Contrast, New Coin, Ons Klyntji, Aerodrome and the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry anthologies, among others, as well as the special South African issue of Illuminations. She was the Writivism Emerging African Writers resident at Stellenbosch University in October 2016.

P.R. Anderson is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Litany Bird and Foundling’s Island. He lectures in English at the University of Cape Town, with a wide range of interests, from Romanticism in the colonial encounter to the culture of the Allied campaign in Italy in 1944-5. His as-yet-untitled collection of poetry released by uHlanga has already been described by JM Coetzee as a book “destined to be a landmark in South African poetry.”

Siphokazi Jonas is a writer, performer and poet, who has written, produced, and performed in three one-woman poetry productions: Poetry Under the Stars, Wrestling with Dawn, and Conspiracy Theory. A champion slam poet and runner-up for the 2016 Sol Plaatje Poetry Award, she currently works at the University of Cape Town, teaching the history of isiXhosa praise poetry, among other things. Her work engages with questions of faith, identity, gender-based violence, cultural and linguistic alienation, black women in rural spaces, and the politics of the everyday.

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We are incredibly proud to have these poets joining us, and we’re eager to bring their work to you over the course of what promises to be a great year for South African poetry. More news, including release dates and advance information about each poet’s collection, will be forthcoming in the new year.

Helen Moffett's Prunings wins a SALA!

We are thrilled to announce that Helen Moffett's collection Prunings, published by uHlanga in 2016, has been named one of two co-winners in the Poetry category of the South African Literary Awards.

uHlanga would like to thank the Department of Arts and Culture and the wRite Associates for the honour.

We would also like to congratulate the other co-winner of the award, Simphiwe Ali Nolutshungu, who was recognised for her collection Iingcango Zentliziyo. (We are especially pleased that a collection in an African language has been honoured this year.)

Other winners can be viewed here.

Prunings is available and available for order in all good bookstores in South Africa, and through the African Books Collective in the Europe and the U.S. Readers in other countries are welcome be in touch with us to order copies directly.