Announcing: Modern Rasputin, by Rosa Lyster

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.

uHlanga x David Krut Poetry Evenings #3: Shirmoney Rhode & Helen Moffett

Thursday 10 November 2016
David Krut Projects Cape Town
Montebello Design Centre, Newlands, Cape Town
1830–2000

uHlanga and David Krut Projects invite you to an evening of poetry and art in Newlands, featuring a reading from our latest published poet, Helen Moffett, and a very special guest, the performance poet Shirmoney Rhode.

David Krut Projects will be selling Helen's collection, 'Prunings', Shirmoney's collection, Nomme 20 Delphi Straat (published by Modjaji Books) well as other uHlanga collections.

Free entry and delicious sponsored wine from Zandvliet!

Our Facebook event is here.

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Helen Moffett was born in Pretoria in 1961. A poet, editor, feminist activist and academic, her publications include university textbooks, an anthology of landscape writings, a cricket book (with the late Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes), and the Girl Walks In erotica series (with Sarah Lotz and Paige Nick under the nom de plume Helena S. Paige). Her first poetry collection, Strange Fruit, was published by our friends at Modjaji Books in 2009, and her latest release, Prunings, was published earlier this year by uHlanga. She lives in Noordhoek.

Shirmoney Rhode is a 25-year-old writer and performance poet who grew up on the Cape Flats in Elsies River. She predominantly writes in Kaapse Afrikaans, which is the dialect of Afrikaans spoken in the Western Cape. An alumnus of the University of the Western Cape, she is currently teaching Afrikaans at Claremont High School in Cape Town.

Announcing debut collections from Koleka Putuma, Rosa Lyster & Francine Simon

uHlanga's stable of new South African voices is growing. Today we are thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of three debut collections from exceptional young women: Koleka Putuma, Rosa Lyster, and Francine Simon.

Lyster's collection, Modern Rasputin, comes out late-November 2016. Simon's collection, Thungachi, is slated for release in February 2017. Putuma's as-yet-untitled book will be out in April 2017.

Rosa Lyster (b. 1984) is a writer born in Durban. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Cape Town, and works as a staff writer at Prufrock, and as contributor to the Sunday Times, the Hairpin, Casimir and Between 10 and 5. Her poems have appeared in the uHlanga magazine, the Toast, and elsewhere. She writes an essay a week on her website, rosalyster.com. Follow her on Twitter at @rosalyster.

Francine Simon (b. 1990) grew up in Durban. Her poetry has been published widely in South African magazines and anthologies. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the University of Stellenbosch. Her debut reading will take place at David Krut Projects on 18 August 2016, with Stephen Symons. She will also be appearing at the uHlanga showcase at the McGregor Poetry Festival on 27 August. Follow her on Twitter at @WriterGirlRose.

Koleka Putuma (b. 1993) is a director, writer and performance poet. In 2014, she became South Africa's first national slam poetry champion. Her poem "Water" won her the PEN SA Student Writing Award (video below). Her plays – which include UHM and Mbuzeni – resulted in a nomination for the Rosalie van der Gucht Prize for Best New Directors at the annual Fleur Du Cap Theatre Awards in 2015. She is currently a resident poet and creative director of poetry collective Lingua Franca, and the co-founder of The Papercut Collective theatre company. Follow her on Twitter at @KPutuma.

We are exceptionally proud to have all three writers on board with uHlanga. Expect more news about each collection as their release dates approach.

Announcing: Prunings, by Helen Moffett

uHlanga are proud to announce our latest release: Prunings, by Helen Moffett. This chapbook/collection hybrid presents some of our most experimental and performative poetry yet, from one of South African literature's most prolific editorial forces.

Where do unfinished poems go – the early buds, the offcuts, all of the blooms that can't be bunched together? In this beguiling bouquet of travel poetry, diary fragments, letters, works-in-progress and retrospection, Helen Moffett offers us a rare look into the workings, misfirings and triumphs of a literary mind. A collection of tentative moments and emotions, rendered in fleeting and experimental forms.

Helen Moffett was born in Pretoria in 1961. A poet, editor, feminist activist and academic, her publications include university textbooks, an anthology of landscape writings, a cricket book (with the late Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes), and the Girl Walks In erotica series (with Sarah Lotz and Paige Nick under the nom de plume Helena S. Paige). Her first poetry collection, Strange Fruit, was published by our friends at Modjaji Books in 2009. She lives in Noordhoek.

With an unfinished cover illustration by the late botanical artist Ellaphie Ward-Hilhorst, this is a collection that embodies the trials and small victories of being a writer; the side of a poet and creative mind that few people ever see.

Prunings will be released in September 2016, for sale through bookstores throughout South Africa, and elsewhere from the African Books Collective.

Thabo Jijana wins 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize; Genna Gardini wins Commendation

uHlanga is thrilled to announce that Thabo Jijana’s Failing Maths and My Other Crimes is the winner of the 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry – South Africa's most prestigious poetry award – with Genna Gardini's collection, Matric Rage, given special commendation. Both collections were part of the uHlanga New Poets series in 2015.

The Ingrid Jonker Prize committee's release states:

In a fiercely-contested struggle among seven eligible volumes, Jijana’s debut emerged victorious. Jijana was championed by one judge in particular, who described his debut, with its ‘subtle, wry and memorable title’, as ‘a rich and satisfying collection where, unusually, every poem strikes something hard and vital.’  The judge went on to remark that ‘Jijana has a painterly way with the image, capturing in impossibly few words a picture that does most of the poem’s outer work, so that the poet himself can get on with what it is he is trying to say’. 

The judge observed that ‘while the self is – in any enquiring poet’s obsessions – an important project, what emerges here is not the self as the bull’s eye, but the self as link – between histories, times, generations and people’.

Gardini’s debut was singled out for her ‘lyrical-experimental imagination’ which contributes to the ‘edginess’ and ‘sexiness’ of the poems and their ‘wonderfully varied scenarios’.

This year’s judges were Karin Schimke, Jim Pascual Agustin and Professor Sally-Ann Murray. Judges of the Ingrid Jonker prize are unaware of one another’s identities until judging is complete.

uHlanga would like to thank the Ingrid Jonker Prize committee and judges for this vindicating, thrilling and humbling honour for us and our two poets. We'd also like to congratulate Modjaji Books' Elisa Galgut, who also won a Commendation for The Attribute of Poetry.

The 2016 Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry will be handed over at the Franschhoek Literary Festival on Saturday 14 May at 17.15 in the Council Chamber. This is a free event, at which uHlanga poets will be reading. For media enquiries, please email nick at uhlangapress dot co dot za.