MODERN RASPUTIN
Rosa Lyster

November 2016
72pp
200x130mm
ISBN: 978-0-620-73322-9

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Challenge extended: we wonder, 
would you spend an afternoon
in the dark and foreign corners
of the Wikipedia category “Australian Criminals”?

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Eclectic, eccentric and eloquent, Modern Rasputin firmly establishes Rosa Lyster as one of South Africa's most exciting young writers. Diving into a (not entirely made-up) world of precocious children, hand-poked tattoos, minor royalty, Russian prisons, and electrocuting water faucets, Lyster's debut is a testament to the wild machinations of imagination and the soft poignancies of friendship and young womanhood. 

With found poems – from e-mails, books, and exam papers – treatises on film, and other poetic anarchies, Lyster expands traditional concepts of narrative poetry, providing one of the most unpredictable and cosmopolitan collections from South Africa in years.

Rosa Lyster was born in Durban in 1984. Her writing has been published by The New Yorker, Prufrock, The Millions, The Hairpin, The Toast, the Sunday Times, and many others. Rosa lives in Cape Town, where she works as an essayist and a PhD student at the University of Cape Town.