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Gordon writes:
Dayspring: A Memoir (Karavan Press and uHlanga) is by CJ (Jonty) Driver, a poet and political activist against apartheid. He is a moral being writing with a directness that comes from the soul. This honesty reminds me of the autobiographical fictions of JM Coetzee, who edited this book. The memorable relationships are with interrogators while Driver was imprisoned and with a girl he loved. He’s truthful, too, when it comes to his own failure: casual infidelity. Goodness is hard to convey, but this memoir does so, a respite in a world rent by liars.
See the other New Statesman Books of the Year here.
uHlanga is proud to announce the November 2024 publication of Fall Risk, the latest collection from Kobus Moolman.
Kobus is one of South Africa’s best-known and most productive poets, as well as an influential mentor and educator. In this stark and breathtaking new sequence of poems, the poet returns to a familiar theme, but with a new intensity.
Disability and ill health lead to distress and confinement, but not silence. Here Moolman finds a way, through poetic and linguistic experimentation, to make sense of his mortal body, and to express what our bodies cannot say for themselves. Reaching back into our elemental beginnings, contemplating silent rock and running water, we find out something new about how we comprehend the inevitable processes of aging and ailing.
This is Kobus’s third book with uHlanga, after editing the anthology Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way and collaborating with Shubnum Khan on the limited-edition chapbook All and Everything, which was subsequently translated into Danish. uHlanga poet Genna Gardini says of the new collection that “Moolman writes about living, and living in a body, with sharp attention and great beauty. There are poems in this book that you will return to again and again.”
Photo by Val Adamson
Kobus Moolman was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1964, and is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English Studies at the University of the Western Cape.
He has published eleven previous collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and a collection of short stories. Among other accolades, he has won the 2002 Ingrid Jonker Prize, the 2010 South African Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2016 Glenna Luschei Award for African Poetry. He has edited several anthologies including, most recently, Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma (UKZN Press, 2023) with Duncan Brown and Nkosinathi Sithole. He lives in Riebeek West.
We will have launch events and readings for Fall Risk in early 2025. To be notified of events, as well as all of our new titles, sign up to our mailing list using the sidebar form, or on our About page.
uHlanga is proud to distribute, on behalf of Crane River, the debut collection by Adré Marshall, Visitations.
In a singular collection, Adré Marshall captures those intense encounters that take on the significance of a ‘visitation’. The poems are lyrical, humorous and elegiac by turn, even all three at once, and in her exploration of the complex interactions between people and the natural world, she finds many reasons in our modern times for both disquiet and consolation.
Poet Finuala Dowling writes that Marshall’s collection exhibits a “deep thematic connectedness that runs throughout... about paying attention to nature, the cycles of life and death, and human encounters with the wild.”
Adré Marshall taught English at various universities, most recently the University of Cape Town. Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies and journals, she has read at the McGregor Poetry Festival and is the author of a book on Henry James.
Her translations from French into English include Le Grand Livre de la Mémoire and a book of critical commentary/articles for the Picasso and Africa exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. One of her poems was placed 3rd in the 2022 AVBOB Poetry Competition, while another was shortlisted for the National Poetry Prize in 2023.
The book releases in South Africa in October 2024.
Karavan Press and uHlanga are proud to announce the release of Dayspring, a memoir by the renowned South African-English poet and novelist C. J. Driver, edited and with a foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee.
The book releases on 1 July 2024 in South Africa.
Dayspring is a recollection of Driver’s South African youth – his childhood as a reverend’s son in Kroonstad and Grahamstown-Makhanda preceding his extraordinary student years at the University of Cape Town, during which he edited the student newspaper Varsity and became enmeshed in radical student politics.
As president of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students, Driver was detained by the security police, tortured and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Cape Town. Even after fleeing to England, Driver remained a bête-noire for the apartheid authorities, with ex-president B. J. Vorster keeping personal notes on Driver’s activities.
But all that comes later in his life. Dayspring is a tender and deeply personal book, offering an intimate picture of a family coming to terms with the losses of the Second World War. It is the story of a father and son recognising their differing beliefs, and of a young man navigating the joys and pitfalls of romance. As a direct descendant of the 1820 Settlers, Driver examines the contradictory beliefs and institutions of the South Africa he grew up in – particularly its boarding schools – with unique insight and humour.
Throughout the reader discovers the moments of inspiration, failure and literary exchange that were crucial to the development of Driver’s fiction, celebrated internationally during his lifetime, as well as his poetry, which, even before his death in 2023, has been lauded as one of the most significant bodies of work by a modern South African poet.
In Dayspring, we are witness to the formation of a sensitive, incisive intellect; someone who did not simply engage with the world through literature, but faced up to it, too.
Driver’s final collection of poems, Still Further, was previously published by uHlanga in 2020
C. J. DRIVER, always known as Jonty, was born in Cape Town in 1939. He was the author of ten collections of poetry, five novels, and numerous works of non-fiction. President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963–4, Jonty was detained in solitary confinement by the security police, subsequently fleeing to England. He became stateless and his writings were banned. His professional life was spent as a schoolmaster in Hong Kong and England.
Jonty died in England in 2023. Since then, he has been hailed as one of South Africa’s major modern poets.
J. M. COETZEE was born in Cape Town in 1940 and studied at the University of Cape Town from 1957 to 1961. Between 1972 and 2000, he held a series of positions on the staff at UCT. His writings have won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. He currently lives in Adelaide, South Australia.
FOR REVIEW COPIES contact Karina Szczurek, publisher, Karavan Press, karavanpress@outlook.com
FOR INTERVIEWS AND PRESS INQUIRIES contact Nick Mulgrew, director, uHlanga, nick@uhlangapress.co.za