Announcing In a Free State by P.R. Anderson, and the new edition of Foundling's Island

uHlanga is proud to announce the imminent release and launch of In a Free State: A Music, the third book by award-winning poet P.R. Anderson, as well as the new edition of his second collection, Foundling’s Island.

Already lauded by Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee as a book “destined to be a landmark in South African poetry”, In a Free State constitutes a unique and ambitious new approach for Anderson. With 74 poems split into 3 sections, choral spines and an assortment of voices, Anderson discombobulates and re-assembles the image and idiom of the various nations, landscapes and earthscapes of central South Africa. From first peoples, to those who took and settled on their ancestral lands, and to those for whom that land would come ancestral, In a Free State encompasses and compresses centuries of human drama into a fleeting and temperamental poetic narrative.

Yet this is no drudge, nor is it a historical yarn. With an easy mastery of form and metre, coupled with swashbuckling metaphorical and -textual flourish, Anderson’s new “music” is a bold and visionary work. A piece of South African poetry – and South African storytelling – unlike any other.

We’re also happy to be re-publishing Anderson’s award-winning second collection, Foundling’s Island, which was published by UCT’s Centre for Creative Writing and Electric Books Works in 2007, and which, as an unfinished manuscript, shared the 2003 Sanlam Literary Award. The collection announced his arrival as a fresh and significant voice in South African poetry.

In print again for the first time in a decade, Foundling’s Island’s journey of coasts, creatures and dreams is as tightly crafted and joyously readable as it has ever been – a collection in which form is created and meaning maintained with the lightest of touches, to the greatest effect.

P.R. Anderson, born in 1967, studied at the Universities of Oxford and Cape Town; he currently lectures at the latter in English Language and Literature. The recipient of the 2017 Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry and the 2003 Sanlam Literary Award, he is also the author of the collection Litany Bird (Carapace Poets, 2000).

In a Free State and Foundling’s Island will be launched on Wednesday 28 November 2018 at the Book Lounge in Cape Town. Further events in the city and in the country will be advertised in 2019.

uHlanga distributes with Protea Boekhuis

uHlanga is proud to announce a partnership with Protea Boekhuis's Distribution Centre.

Protea Boekhuis started as Protea Boekwinkel, a small bookstore in Pretoria, in 1992. Twenty-five years later, they now publish books, as well as distribute and represent the books of other presses.

As of 1 September 2018, Protea Boekhuis will represent, sell and distribute all uHlanga titles to the book trade in South Africa and Namibia.

uHlanga would like to sincerely thank Xavier Nagel Agencies, our distribution partner since 2015, for their great work over the past three years.

Announcing the publication and tour of Swedish poet Athena Farrokzhad in South Africa

We're proud to announce, in association with Argos Books in the USA, the publication of Swedish poet Athena Farrokhzad's incredible debut White Blight, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida, for the first time in South Africa.

The first foreign book on uHlanga's list, White Blight is being released in SA in conjunction with Farrokzhad's two-week tour of Gauteng and Cape Town this September, which she is making with the support of Open Book Festival, Hear My Voice Poetry Sessions and the Embassy of Sweden in Pretoria. Tour dates are at the bottom of this post.

Specially printed in Latvia, this mirror-faced book contains an evocative interweaving of voices exploring migration and assimilation by one of Sweden's foremost leftist and feminist intellectuals, delicately translated by Jennifer Hayashida. This once-off tour and run of 250 books is a must-see and must-own.

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"This vital book exposes the dense tectonics churning beneath migrant dreams. Accusatory, loving, full of grief and sage truths, Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight speaks eloquently to the troubled inheritance of diasporic survival. Through a litany of terse voices, Jennifer Hayashida’s sensitive translation describes the nexus of filial obligations and projections under which the narrator sinks from view. The intense beauty of devastation and the poignancy of betrayal emerge with startling frankness: “Your family will never be resurrected like roses after a fire.” “I have spent a fortune for your piano lessons / But at my funeral you will refuse to play.” These white lines make me ask, what has been bleached out in all of our stories? I read this book, and I remembered my humanity." — Sueyeun Juliette Lee

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TOUR DATES

• Thursday 30 August, 2 p.m. – Last Thursdays Poetry Session, Es’kia Mphahlele Library. Tshwane

• Saturday 1 September, 11 a.m. – Jozi Book Fair Poetry Workshop with Athena Farrokhzad, Mary Fitzgerald Square, Newtown, Johannesburg

• Saturday 1 September, 1:15 p.m. – Jozi Book Fair Swedish Poetry Performances with Emil Boss, Jenny Wrangborg and Magnus Gustafson, Mary Fitzgerald Square, Newtown, Johannesburg

• Sunday 2 September, 11 a.m. – Jozi Book Fair Discussion: Writing, struggles and the working class with Magnus Gustaffson and Jolyn Phillips, Mary Fitzgerald Square, Newtown, Johannesburg

• Sunday 2 September, 2 p.m. – Jozi Book Fair launch of White Blight, Mary Fitzgerald Square, Newtown, Johannesburg

• Wednesday 5 September, 8 p.m. – Rioters in Session, Fugard Theatre, Cape Town

• Thursday 6 September, 6:30 p.m. – Grounding Sessions, Zer021, 46 Canterbury St, Cape Town

• Thursday 6 September, 8 p.m. – Open Book Discussion: Who are You? with Aminatta Forna, Sue Nyathi and Jen Malec, A4 Ground, 23 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town

• Saturday 8 September, 12 p.m. – Open Book Discussion: Poetry Matters with Vangile Gantsho and Toni Stuart, Fugard Theatre, Cape Town

Tickets available from Jozi Book Fair and Open Book Festival

Announcing Zikr by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

Cover photograph by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

uHlanga is proud to announce the upcoming publication of Zikr, the debut collection by Johannesburg writer and photographer Saaleha Idrees Bamjee.

To be resolute in faith – in God, in oneself – in times of grief and disappointment. To unapologetically assert one's woman- and personhood in a society that attempts to devalue both. To seek hidden parts of yourself, both new and forgotten, through the memories and words of other people.

In Zikr's beguilingly measured and covertly powerful poems, Saaleha Idrees Bamjee achieves these often difficult tasks. In doing so, Bamjee introduces new idioms and understandings of Muslim identity to South African poetry – yet not through manifesto, nor outright polemic. This is a collection of fine metaphors, concrete turns of phrase, and a refreshing specificity of image,  place, and self.

Photo by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

Saaleha Idrees Bamjee, born in 1983, is a photographer and writer based in Johannesburg. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and is the winner of the 2014 Writivism Short Story Prize. Zikr is her first collection of poems.

The book comes off presses on 1 September 2018. Launches are being organised, and will be announced on our Instagram, and on Bamjee's social media.