Poetry NonScenes – out now!

uHlanga is proud to announce the publication of Poetry NonScenes, a new collection of performance poems by newcomers to the poetry scene, compiled in part by the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP).

Fresh new voices! Here is a range of South Africans – school learners, university students, and working professionals – giving their poetic perspective on the modern world.

Compiled from two workshops held in 2024, this collection shows that the poetry of the stage is also of the page, covering an array of subjects and unrestrained by form. Edgy, experimental and passionate, diverse and dynamic reflections on the present moment in South Africa and the world, by those who will write its future.

(Performances from the two workshops, many of which relate to poems within this collection, can be seen at www.poetrynonscenes.com and www.zapp.org.za.)

This anthology was produced in collaboration with ZAPP and Poetry NonScenes, supported by the Johannesburg Holocaust Centre, the External Engagement Committee of the History Department of University College London, the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa. It includes new performance poems by Shade K. Olugbosi, Dshamilja Roshani, Amanda Majola, Elizabeth Makanha-Dhliwayo, Kiara Braum, Denise Newfield, Rachel Freeme, Katlego Malema, Ivai Nyamutsamba, Sharon Rose, Tshegofatso Masemola, Nicole Best, Katlego Choshi, Delyne Nyasha Madziva, Kekana Phologo, Busisiwe Kgosi, Sabrina Alho, Ntokozo Twala, Ilanit Furman, Tania Nobantu Ngindana, Jolene Raison, Sandisiwe Dlamini, Olive Olusegun, Mpho Mametja, Imange Lobese, Choaro Letsoha, Diyoni Harisinghe, Leya Muthen, and Laeeqa Ebrahim.

Poetry NonScenes is out now, and is available in and to order from good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.

Click here to buy a copy from Wordsworth Books in South Africa for R150 excluding delivery.

Like all of our books currently in print, it is also available overseas through the African Books Collective.

For press and review copies, mail nick@uhlangapress.co.za. Distribution in Southern Africa is managed by Protea Distribution. Bookstores (and other retail) may order at cserv@proteadistribution.co.za.

Dayspring named a New Statesman Book of the Year

We were thrilled to find out last week that Dayspring by C. J. Driver, edited by J. M. Coetzee, was selected as Lyndall Gordon’s book of the year for the New Statesman.

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.

Announcing Fall Risk by Kobus Moolman

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.

Announcing Visitations by Adré Marshall, published by Crane River

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.