AN ILLUMINATED DARKNESS
Jacques Coetzee

September 2020
70pp
200mm x 130mm
ISBN: 9781990968662

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Winner of the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize

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(There are shards of light also, but
I will say nothing about them.
A cellphone camera is recording
what may be shared of this moment afterwards.)

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This volume is also available as a free audiobook.

This book is available in Braille at all libraries for print-disabled readers in South Africa. These books have been produced by Blind SA and donated by uHlanga.

Some print copies of this book are distributed with a decorative cover sticker printed in braille.

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Unwanted prayers on your behalf, kindnesses that you end up resenting – living with visual impairment is less about matters of sight than it is about problems of perception.

A life without mirrors is not a life without self-examination. On the contrary, Jacques Coetzee’s debut is a manifesto of personhood, a portrait of a world brought into being by its textures, its movements, and – most importantly – its music. Easy-flowing and sensuous, this is a collection of the unexpected, the strange, and the suddenly beautiful. Unavoidably and undeniably, Coetzee’s is a truly unique perspective.

Jacques Coetzee, born in 1972, matriculated from the Pioneer School for the Blind in Worcester. He has worked as a busker at the Cape Town Waterfront, and has tutored English literature to first- and second-year university students. In 2002 he obtained a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and in 2018, he and Barbara Fairhead published a joint anthology of poems, The Love Sheet. He currently lives in Cape Town, where he is a singer-songwriter in the band Red Earth & Rust.