Jacques Coetzee wins 2022 Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry

Only months after winning the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for his debut collection An Illuminated Darkness, Jacques Coetzee has this week been awarded the 2022 Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry.

The Olive Schreiner Prize is awarded annually by the English Academy of South Africa to emerging writers in the fields of drama, prose, and poetry, rotating between those categories in a three-year cycle. Since 1961 it has been awarded to many luminaries of South African literature, including Oswald Mtshali, Douglas Livingstone, Antjie Krog, Lionel Abrahams, and many more.

Congratulations to Jacques for such an amazing feat.

Announcing The Book of Unrest by Nick Mulgrew

We’re proud to announce the publication on 1 November 2022 of The Book of Unrest, the second collection of poems by Nick Mulgrew.

An ocean of floodwater. Shipwrecked toddlers. Skeletons that rise from pristine beaches. In his second book of poems, Nick Mulgrew confronts the natural and human disasters of the eastern South African coast – and, in the process, himself.

An unflinching examination of ancestry and place, of ruined childhoods and a troubled present, The Book of Unrest conjures a world of alternating beauty and horror; a series of tainted land-, city- and seascapes, increasingly hostile to those living in them. Drawing upon the wisdom of other Durban writers, Mulgrew interrogates the purposes of poetry and politics in such a fraught time and place. Can our traumas be learned from, or do they only shackle us to the past?

In turns elegiac and nihilistic, witty and desperate, sprawling and precise, these poems sift through personal and collective histories of mistrust and violence, to find what, if anything, can bring us rest.

Picture of Nick Mulgrew by Mia Borman

Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban in 1990. He attended Rhodes University, Makhanda, and the University of Cape Town, the latter as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar.

He is the author of four previous books, including The First Law of Sadness, winner of the 2018 Nadine Gordimer Award, and the novel A Hibiscus Coast, longlisted for the 2022 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Among other things, he is a recipient of the 2016 Thomas Pringle Award, a runner-up for the 2021 Desperate Literature Award, and a finalist for the 2021 National Poetry Prize.

He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. He is the director of uHlanga.

The Book of Unrest releases 1 November 2022. It is available in and to order from good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Like all of our books currently in print, it is also available overseas through the African Books Collective.

For press and copies, mail nick@uhlangapress.co.za. Distribution in Southern Africa is managed by Protea Distribution. Bookstores and other retail may order from Tania at 021 699 850, or orders@proteadistribution.co.za.

Jacques Coetzee wins 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for An Illuminated Darkness

Jacques Coetzee has won the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for a debut collection in English with his book An Illuminated Darkness, published by uHlanga in 2020.

The Ingrid Jonker Prize is awarded in alternate years to the best debut collection published in South Africa in English or Afrikaans. Twelve entries were received for the 2022 prize, which was judged by Malika Ndlovu, Ken Barris and Arja Salafranca. Judges of the Ingrid Jonker prize are unaware of each other’s identities until judging is complete.

One of the judges praised the meditative tone of Coetzee’s collection, pointing out that Coetzee “does not strive for technical effects, but seems more concerned to express delicate, deeply felt intangibles of life, silence, death, love – often in the context of blindness and the pain and anger, however sublimated, that goes with it.”

Another judge observed that the poet “writes with a musician’s ear and heart’s depths of listening that consciously unfolds the lines of the poems, particularly the shifts in rhythm.”

This is the third Ingrid Jonker Prize won by uHlanga authors for books in English, following Thabo Jijana’s win in 2016 for Failing Maths and My Other Crimes, and Saaleha Idrees Bamjee in 2020 for Zikr.

Coetzee’s collection is currently available in print format from all good bookstores in South Africa, in Braille at all libraries for the print-disabled in South Africa, and as a free audiobook.

Congratulations to Jacques, and to the other shortlisted writers, Dimaketso Sedite and Sue Woodward. Thank you to the judges and committee members for the prize.

Jacques Coetzee shortlisted for the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize

We are very proud to announce that Jacques Coetzee has been shortlisted for the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for his debut collection An Illuminated Darkness.

(Edit, 18 July 2022: Jacques Coetzee has won the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize.)

The Ingrid Jonker Prize is one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary awards, awarded in alternate years to a first collection of poetry published in English or Afrikaans, the two languages in which Jonker herself wrote. It has been previously awarded twice to uHlanga authors Thabo Jijana in 2016 (for Failing Maths and My Other Crimes), and Saaleha Idrees Bamjee in 2020 (for Zikr).

An Illuminated Darkness was published during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns; a somewhat cruel irony for Coetzee, who is one of the stalwarts of Cape Town’s poetry reading scene as well as a performing musician.

We therefore endeavored to make the book as accessible as possible. Coetzee, who is blind, recorded a free audiobook version of the collection, while uHlanga collaborated with Blind SA to make An Illuminated Darkness available in Braille, with one copy in Braille distributed to every library for the print-disabled in South Africa.

The other shortlisted writers for the prize this year are Dimakatso Sedite for Yellow Shade and Sue Woodward for between the apple and the bite, two other very fine collections. The winner will be announced on 18 July 2022. Good luck to all!