uHlanga are proud to announce our latest release: Modern Rasputin, by Rosa Lyster. Lyster's collection is the first of a trio of releases of debut collections by South African women poets, with collections by Francine Simon and Koleka Putuma to follow in 2017. This weird, poignant and wonderful collection from one of South Africa's brightest and most unique young writers, is set to be released late-November 2016.

Challenge extended: we wonder,
would you spend an afternoon
in the dark and foreign corners
of the Wikipedia category “Australian Criminals”?

Eclectic, eccentric and eloquent, Modern Rasputin firmly establishes Rosa Lyster as one of South Africa's most exciting young writers. Diving into a (not entirely made-up) world of precocious children, hand-poked tattoos, minor royalty, Russian prisons, and electrocuting water faucets, Lyster's debut is a testament to the wild machinations of imagination and the soft poignancies of friendship and young womanhood.

With found poems – from e-mails, books, and exam papers – treatises on film, and other poetic anarchies, Lyster expands traditional concepts of narrative poetry, providing one of the most unpredictable and cosmopolitan collections from South Africa in years.

Rosa Lyster was born in Durban in 1984. Her writing has been published by The New Yorker, Prufrock, The Millions, The Hairpin, The Toast, the Sunday Times, and many others. Rosa lives in Cape Town, where she works as an essayist and a PhD student at the University of Cape Town.

Modern Rasputin will be released in November 2016, for sale through bookstores throughout South Africa, and elsewhere from the African Books Collective. To order copies for your store, contact our distribution agents, Xavier Nagel Agencies.