Move to Blue Weaver and Booksite

All of our trade customers are to note that uHlanga books will, from 1 October 2025, be represented by Blue Weaver and distributed by Booksite. We are looking forward to working with Blue Weaver’s professional and knowledgeable team.

Our books will soon be available to purchase directly from us online from Mzansi Books.

We would like to sincerely thank Phil, Nolu, Tamsin, and the rest of the warehouse team at Protea Distribution for their work with us since 2018, and wish them all the best for the future.

Announcing Kruiper-Crawler by Shane van der Hoven

uHlanga is thrilled to announce the December 2025 publication of Kruiper-Crawler, the debut collection of poems by Shane van der Hoven, in a bilingual Afrikaans-English edition.

Kruiper-Crawler is a collection of poetry unlike any other – queer, radical, multi-segmented. It is also a completely new kind of book for uHlanga – Kruiper-Crawler’s thirty-something poems are presented both in Afrikaans and English, the translations differing, interfering with or even contradicting each other.

Kruiper-Crawler sees Shane van der Hoven explores both the sprawling lowveld and the decaying South African city through the metaphor of the Biblical crawler – the grotesque, misunderstood and unfairly maligned creatures of the earth and scrubland.

Infested with irony and literary allusion, Kruiper-Crawler’s exoskeleton may seem tough and spiny. But break through to its soft interior, and find yourself in a world of self-doubt and linguistic uncertainty, a deep love of the unknown, and, at its core, a young poet discovering what kind of creature they might be.

Shane van der Hoven was born in Benoni, raised in the Lowveld, and currently lives in Cape Town. They are a writer, lecturer, translator and editor. Kruiper-Crawler is their debut poetry collection.

Kruiper-Crawler releases on Monday 1 December 2025 in South Africa. Please see the book’s page for more information, en vir meer inligting in Afrikaans.

Review and press copies may be requested from nick@uhlangapress.co.za.

Please note, from October 2025, uHlanga is distributed by Booksite and represented to the trade by Blue Weaver.

"Musicality is central to my poems": an interview with Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal

In the latest of a series of interviews with uHlanga poets, Megan Ross chats to Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal about his first collection in English, the questions raised by (self-)translation, and the influence of music on his award-winning poetry.


Congratulations on the publication of a corpse is also a garden! The collection – your first in English, and which you translated yourself – is described as “self-deconstructed”.

I’m interested in translation – in the act of translation, but also, and in your case, the act of translating one’s own work. What was this process like, how did it feel?

The process of self-translation felt like a homecoming via a detour. Finding myself in another language helped me to rediscover the feelings and memories that inspired my poems in the first place, and the process became an interlinguistic meditation on what and why I write. Re-encountering my poems in English also exposed the weak spots in some and revealed the strengths in others, vindicating my poetry while enforcing humility.

Afrikaans is your first language. An onomatopeic language, at once alive and beautiful and strange, it is loaded with a fraught history. What was it like writing poetry that deals with your ancestors, and then translating that into a colonising language, a language like English?

I’ve mostly written in Afrikaans over the years, which has enabled me to confront the fraught history of the language head-on. By bending the language back on itself, I could hold up a mirror for Afrikaans-speaking people, one which hopefully allowed readers to question their own upbringing and the preconceptions and prejudices embedded in their language and culture. Excavating my family history, for instance, is something that could have only happened as brutally in Afrikaans. 

But I’ve always felt that my work resonated beyond an Afrikaans audience. Despite the contextual relevance of Afrikaans to my poetry, I’ve long harboured the desire to make my work accessible to more South Africans. These English translations make that larger conversation possible beyond the limitations of Afrikaans.

I’m always interested in this question when it comes to poetry, and new books, and publishing opportunities: why now? You’re an Ingrid Jonker prize-winning poet, critically acclaimed. What took you on this path (I detest the word “journey”) of writing a new collection? 

I finally had enough poems to pick and choose from in my first two collections that I could select what I consider to be my best work for an English readership. Now that I’m moving beyond some of the preoccupations of youth, it felt like the right time to also share this work in English.

I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the title. The title! a corpse is also a garden. I’ve sat with it while creating social media content for uHlanga, while going about my day. Please, tell me about it. Its genesis, the melding together of such opposing concepts (in a way): the corpse, dead; the garden, generative, alive.

I was looking for a title that could capture the ambivalence that characterises my life and work – always the one and the other, opposites bleeding into each other. The title is an acknowledgement of the devastation of (and preoccupation with) death in my poetry, but also holds out hope for the generative consequences of mortality. Life does not stop with death, but simply continues in other forms. The energy stored in my cells and organs will not cease when I die, but will transform into flowers and fungi, sustaining those that are still living.

As an artist, you move between Afrikaans and English. How does writing in English shift your voice, your rhythms, or even your relationship to your audience?

Musicality is central to my poems – being a musician and having performed for most of my life, the way in which poems sound in my mouth and on stage has always been a principal consideration when deciding which turn of phrase, which word, to use. Transferring this musicality to English was one of the greatest joys of the translation process – finding another rhythm and sonority in English that could provide the scaffolding for what I wanted to say. 

I’ve always imagined an interlingual, intercultural audience, probably thanks to my days as director of InZync Poetry, promoting spoken word in the Western Cape. So I’m not sure if my relationship to my intended audience has fundamentally changed now that the poems are in English. But I’ve created a different kind of music to accompany them.

Tell us about the publication process: how have you found publishing with uHlanga?

The publication process was a breeze, probably because I had first sent my poems to Marike Beyers, a Makhanda poet and librarian, to edit and proofread, and to help with the order of the collection. Because the preparation was so extensive, once the manuscript arrived in Nick’s hands, there wasn’t much editing left. We took out a few poems and tweaked a line here or there, but the road from manuscript to book was surprisingly painless. Working with a smaller publisher also brought more of a personal touch to the whole process, a real sense that I was being looked after. This ethics of care seems to characterise uHlanga, and I count myself lucky to have found such a loving home for my poetry in English.

"It must be both": an interview with Kobus Moolman

Megan Ross chats to Professor Kobus Moolman about his latest collection, and the very deepest concerns of his long and distinguished career in writing and teaching poetry.


I recently reread Fall Risk, your latest poetry collection, published by uHlanga, and I was struck by these lines:

Skin is a machine
for feeling things

the way needles do.

This is at once an incredibly human image, and yet it also conjures up aspects of the clinical. Could you speak to this?

I think the clinical aspect that you so accurately identify has its origins in specific medical experiences [I have had], which reflect directly upon the collection as a whole. It is where the whole collection comes from in a way and speaks back to. This is both on a personal level historical, in the sense of being disabled since birth and having so many medical interventions over the years, and also recent, now, as someone who has to have monthly immunotherapy. So that’s the one side to the image. 

But as a writer the image must move beyond the purely personal. And thus while some poems in the book use the first-person singular – which of course, does not ever have to equate with the author – here there is in fact no speaker. On a certain level you could even say (and I like this idea) that the skin actually is the person or thing speaking, which then allows all skins – your skin, everyone’s skin – to speak.

There is an undercurrent of anguish in the collection, and yet the most overpowering feeling I am left with, upon each reading, is love. Always love. And I’ve felt that in many of your works. Could you tell us a little bit about love? Is it transformative? Damning? 

Oh dear. I really don’t know what to say about love. Such a fraught, dangerous, complicated terrain. But yet again, you are very accurate. I might for myself substitute the word ‘compassion’.  I am more comfortable using this word. 

In all my work – whether poetry or plays or short stories – I have always believed in having compassion for my characters, compassion for the world, compassion for others. I am moved deeply by suffering: human, animal, environmental. And so even when I am writing a horrible, ugly, violent piece – like the poem “the earth is flat” or my short story “Kiss and the Brigadier” (both of which are also very funny) – even then I have to have compassion for the terrible characters and events, and even compassion for the language, which might be twisted and cruel, but nevertheless has to be honest and real. As a writer I have to have compassion for reality.

In one poem in Fall Risk, you write about Anaïs Nin, the Sabbath, and God, and the number seven, and what it could all mean. I left this poem wondering about God and [their] love, or lover. I guess I just want to know, where did this poem ‘come from’? Was it a feeling, a question, a wondering?

And maybe, because I was brought up religious (Roman Catholic), I am interested, too, in the God of and in your poems. 

This is big – I honestly don’t know how to answer you. How to answer without actually just referring you back to everything I’ve ever written. How not to close my eyes and cover my eyes with my hands and just say nothing. Because nothing I say can summarise or describe my response to God – the idea of God, Gods, that, there, it, nothing, no-thing, light, dark, depth, infinite, mystery. Just the whole lot wrapped up into a tangle of stuff.  And hard to separate one’s past, growing up in a strict Calvinist background. NG church. And hard to separate those terrible ideas of guilt and punishment that cling to one still – despite all the scrubbing. But, in fact, the plain simple truth for me is that I do believe in something before and something after and something outside and something within all everything and suffused through all and beyond at the same time. And this whatever we call it – leave all the pronouns far behind –  this is the origin of every single small and big and beautiful and ugly thing I have ever written. That ultimately I am not the source. The source is the Dark Light.

In a recent interview with Quinton Mtyala on IOL, you said: 

“I've begun to understand the body and the relationship between the body and language, and different bodies using language differently, and how language can be used to show the body in its differentness.” 

I’d love to hear more about this, about the capacity of language to, as you say ‘activate’ something in someone, perhaps, in a way, give them a chance to convey the uniqueness of their humanity, or their experience of living in a body.

Again, this is the pursuit of Fall Risk, and most of my work over the last decade perhaps – an attempt to explore, to understand, and even to represent the multiple ways in which the body speaks. And I know that this term has become a little bit of a cliché. Kind of tossed around too easily. Without real in-depth and felt engagement. But for me it is felt. It is actually lived. It is a daily, lived-in experience. As it is for everyone in fact. But more often than not for many people the body is a triumph. A site of pleasure. Achievement. Strength. But what about those moments when it is not? When it is the opposite? What about a life lived in that other encounter? How to talk from or about this encounter? And the only way I have learned, and am still learning, struggling through, is to actually talk from this encounter. 

One of the most poignant lines, in my humble opinion, in Fall Risk is “I want to evaporate.” Is this a meditation on mortality, or the imperfectness of a human body, or is it more of a longing to just become a part of the natural fabric of the world?

It’s all of the above. And it’s also Keats’ idea, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”. To be released.

[Long pause.] I think that’s enough of an answer.

You have published over ten collections of poetry. What is it about this medium that returns you to it, over and over?

I’m a sucker for punishment, I suppose. [Laughter.] But also because actually I haven’t said it. I’m not done yet. It’s still unfinished. I am still unfinished. I am still in search. Still looking for it. What’s that line from U2? “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” Plus, I am hungry. I am perpetually hungry.

I read that you teach your students to write a poem. And I love that. I don’t think I’ve ever been taught to write a poem… What has teaching poetry added to – or even taken away from – your experience of writing it yourself?

Phew! I love all your questions, Megan. But they are exhausting. Exhausting because they take me to the real deep centre, the challenges I struggle through on a daily basis. 

I love teaching. I really do. I love helping young people – students, whomever – understand something about themselves and their relationships to the world. Literature and art is one of the fundamental ways of doing this. And teaching the practice of making art for yourself – of making your own art – has helped me understand more keenly how I make my own art. 

But yes, if I have to be honest, honest with myself, then I know that it is taking a toll. It never used to. I was stronger. I was able to sustain, endure, live through the arduousness of the process. Arduous because each time I teach how to write I am going through and experiencing that “blank incapability of invention” that Mary Shelly described in her preface to Frankenstein. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep doing so.

Much of your work is deeply rooted in the South African landscape, yet it often has an otherworldly or dreamlike quality. How do you balance the concrete and the surreal?

It must be both. That is what I strive for. One of the ways I have discovered how to do this is to be as plain and direct as possible to name the thing or things as they are. To force attention so that the reader sees or hears, smells, differently. Or smells the old tired thing in a new way. Shklovsky called it ‘defamiliarization’. That’s exactly it. Rendering the real with sharp and stripped, concentrated focus – through the language of poetry – weirdly, magically, releases or activates this ‘dreamlike quality’ that you speak of.

And finally, I’d love to chat a little bit about publishing with uHlanga. What was this process like, and what drew you to publishing with an indie press?

I’m not intending to flatter you or Nick in any way. But I have profoundly respected the collections that uHlanga has published. I’ve respected Nick’s enduring and passionate commitment to South African writing, specifically poetry. And I’ve wanted to be part of this. Indie presses are where the real fun is to be had, certainly with regards to poetry.  Look at presses like Deep South, Dye Hard, Karavan and Modjaji – they are publishing real stuff! And Nick has just been an absolute pleasure to work with. He hasn’t paid me to say this! [Laughter]