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.