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!

akono Verlag acquires German rights for Kopano Maroga's Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations

uHlanga and akono Verlag are proud to announce the upcoming translation of Kopano Maroga’s Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations into German.

Maroga’s debut will be translated by Berlin-based writer, speaker and actor Ralph Tharayil, supported by the German Translator’s Fund, and will be published by akono, based in Leipzig.

Since its publication in the hard-lockdown days of November 2020, Jesus Thesis has attracted rave reviews. South Africa’s News24 praised Maroga’s debut as both “harrowing” and “tender”, adding that “Jesus Thesis invites readers to investigate their preconceptions by making empathy coexist alongside sorrow while combining the erotic with grief and alienation.”

Similarly, U.S magazine MAYDAY praised Maroga’s imagining of “Jesus’s “lost years” as full of queer erotic bliss and newly vibrant prayers”, with poems that “revolt against convention” and praise “the holy black queer self”.

Akono’s director Jona Elisa Krützfeld is delighted with the collaboration, which has come about in the midst of the pandemic and across four countries. “I am so happy and grateful that through this project we can expand Kopano Maroga's and uHlanga’s creative network – and especially that the German-speaking audience will be introduced to Maroga’s extraordinary and courageous work. We hope to be touring through Germany with readings and performances of Jesus Thesis in 2023.”

“This deal is wonderful news,” says uHlanga’s director Nick Mulgrew. “It always struck me as a cruel irony that a book by one of South Africa’s great young performance artists came out at a time when they could not perform in public, due to the Covid pandemic. This marks a resurrection, not just for an excellent book by an excellent writer, but for our collective hopes as literary workers. Thank you to akono Verlag for making this dream a reality.”

Announcing 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.

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.

Athambile Masola wins NIHSS Award for Poetry, Kopano Maroga shortlisted

We’re proud to announce that Athambile Masola’s debut collection of poems in isiXhosa, Ilifa, has won the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences award for Best Fiction (Poetry). An amazing result for poetry in isiXhosa!

In addition, Kopano Maroga’s collection, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, was named on the shortlist.

The awards were announced at a ceremony on 31 March 2022 at the Javett-UP Arts Centre. Thank you to the judges and organisers, and congratulations to the other winners.