This is not gone
Megan Hall

November 2026
66 pp
200mm x 130mm with flaps
ISBN: 9781048300949

When you wake, we’ll go again,
go and go and go – run to the park, pram in tow,
running, running into the future together
for a while.

In this, her second collection, Ingrid Jonker Prize winner Megan Hall unfolds an intimate story – of learning to become a mother, of loss and the ravages of time – in spare, almost understated poems.

Through the backseat chaos of young children and the stillness of midnight and early morning, she grapples with what it is that remains and can sustain us, even as children and parents age, and the boundaries of self and love shift.

Interleaved with these poems of private life are painterly land- and seascapes of the Cape, which also reflect on the questions that preoccupy her. Tender, wondrous and precise, these poems are testiment to an enduring talent in South African poetry.

Megan Hall was born in Cape Town in 1972, and studied at the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch. She is the author of Fourth Child (2007), which won the 2008 Ingrid Jonker Prize.

First published when she was 19, Hall's poetry has appeared in many local poetry magazines, and has been anthologised for school and university students. She took part in Poetry Africa 2008 and has worked as an editor on English Alive! and New Contrast.

After almost two decades publishing award-winning dictionaries and literature at Oxford University Press Southern Africa, she now works as a freelance publisher in Cape Town.