Announcing A Short Treatise on Mortality by Douglas Reid Skinner

A Short Treatise on Mortality by Douglas Reid Skinner

Cover image by revel j fox

Five years after the publication of Liminal, uHlanga is proud to announce the publication in June 2022 of A Short Treatise on Mortality, our second title by Douglas Reid Skinner, and the poet’s eighth title overall.

Despite being based in England, Skinner is already very well known among South African poets as the editor of Stanzas magazine, and as the English language editor of the AVBOB Poetry Project. (And, in the late 80s and early 90s, the director of Carrefour.)

Here, in a surprisingly humorous volume, Skinner’s lifetime of writing becomes the writing of a lifetime. With verse ranging from the philosophical to the surreal, Skinner ponders the most universal of questions and concerns – how to live, and, perhaps more crucially, how to die.

Through landscapes of ploughed fields, dream highways, and building sites alike, our human concepts of memory and literature are observed, retraced, or even deconstructed. Behind the easy intelligence and humour, Skinner remains a flagbearer for the traditions of South African poetry in English. Poems are written for writers and loved ones who have passed, others for those who have most of their years to come – all held in expert balance by a master of his art.

Douglas Reid Skinner by Carol Voss

Author photo by Carol Voss

Douglas Reid Skinner was born in Upington in 1949, and went to school in Makhanda (Grahamstown), Kimberley and East London. For a living, he has worked variously as a driller and miner in the Northern Cape, a programmer and systems analyst in London and the USA, a publisher in Cape Town, a fine wine trader in England, and in house refurbishing and maintenance in Surrey, where he lives at present.

He is the author of seven collections and an edition of new and selected poems, as well as numerous translations.

A Short Treatise on Mortality is available in and to order from good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana from June 2022. Like all of our books currently in print, it will also be available overseas through the African Books Collective.

For press and copies, mail nick@uhlangapress.co.za.

Announcing Peach Country, the debut collection by Nondwe Mpuma

We are proud to announce the publication in April 2022 of Peach Country, the debut collection by Nondwe Mpuma.

This slim volume should not be underestimated. With dreamy cover art from Shakil Solanki, our first release of 2022 will take you on an equally dreamy journey through landscapes of tornado-stricken villages, mythical beings, and the eternally evanescent promise of love.

Grounded by understated and precise verse, Mpuma weaves together the spiritual and the natural with effortless, imagistic flair. In Peach Country there is celebration, mourning, meditation, prayer, exploration, impatience and joy; throughout, however, Mpuma maintains an open-eyed wonder at the entirety of existence, viewed from her particular, and particularly enchanting, corner of the world.

Photo by Sanelisiwe Ndlovu

Nondwe Mpuma was born in 1995, in Lubaleko, emaXesibeni, on the rural plains of the Eastern Cape. A Mellon Mays Fellow during her undergraduate studies, Mpuma has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Western Cape, and is currently a lecturer at the same institution.

The winner of the 2017 Patricia Schonstein Poetry in McGregor Award, Mpuma has been published widely in South Africa and abroad. (Including in the previous uHlanga collection Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way). She is currently one of the organisers of The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Society, based in Cape Town, where she lives.

Peach Country will be available from April 2022 in all good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, and printed on demand overseas from the African Books Collective. Distribution in Southern Africa is done by Protea Distribution. Bookstores and other retail may order from Tamsin Doubell at 021 699 850, or orders@proteadistribution.co.za.

Detail from “Silly Little Fool, Anything Could Happen (!)”, by Shakil Solanki




Dr Lindiwe Mabuza, poet, editor and ambassador, 1938–2021

At the end of yet another difficult year, I was greatly saddened to hear of the death of Dr Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, on 6 December 2021. She was 83.

Many people and organisations – far more important than uHlanga, and far more intimately involved with Dr Mabuza’s life and work – have left tributes since her death. I have never suffered the death of an author before, and I have found it tremendously difficult to address, but I shall try nonetheless.

I was privileged enough to work with Dr Mabuza during the project which saw uHlanga, in collaboration with Dr Uhuru Phalafala and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, re-release Malibongwe, a book of poetry written by South African women, who were chiefly in exile during the Struggle. Mabuza, working under the nom de plume Sono Molefe, had commissioned, collated and edited the original book, which was eventually published under the banner of the ANC throughout Europe in the 1980s, and which we eventually brought out in its first South African edition last year.

We have not just lost a great South African, but a great poet, editor, organiser, journalist, freedom fighter, and, eventually, ambassador for the democratic nation that her life’s work helped to bring into being. A life such as hers can’t be encapsulated in a pithy statement. Our democracy was, as she prophetically wrote in the original foreword to Malibongwe in 1982, “a victory no power on earth can deny the people of South Africa”. May you rest peacefully in your victory, Dr Mabuza.

I would like to send my condolences to Dr Mabuza’s family and friends in this painful time.

–NM