I am greatly saddened to share news of the passing of Charles Jonathan Driver, known always as Jonty. He died in Bristol on Sunday 21 May 2023 after a short illness. Jonty was a giant, not simply in stature. As a young man, his involvement in the student movement against apartheid – in particular his association with the African Resistance Movement and as his time as president of the National Union of South African students – resulted in a month-long detention in solitary confinement. On his release he immediately moved to England with the help of Professor Robert Birley, eventually enrolling ..read more

We’re happy to announce that Nondwe Mpuma’s debut collection Peach Country was shortlisted for the 2023 NIHSS Awards. The book was shortlisted alongside books from Antjie Krog, Kelwyn Sole and Sarah Lubala – books from four different publishers; proof that poetry publishing in South Africa has been strong this past year! Congratulations to Nondwe, as well as to Sarah Lubala, whose collection A History of Disappearance (published by Botsotso) took the winner’s prize ..read more

Only months after winning the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for his debut collection An Illuminated Darkness, Jacques Coetzee has this week been awarded the 2022 Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry. The Olive Schreiner Prize is awarded annually by the English Academy of South Africa to emerging writers in the fields of drama, prose, and poetry, rotating between those categories in a three-year cycle. Since 1961 it has been awarded to many luminaries of South African literature, including Oswald Mtshali, Douglas Livingstone, Antjie Krog, Lionel Abrahams, and many more. Congratulations to Jacques for su ..read more

We’re having two book launches this year at Poetry in McGregor, deep in the (not-so-warm) bosom of the Western Cape. Come see Douglas Reid Skinner and Nondwe Mpuma read on the morning of Saturday 19 November. More information here ..read more

We’re proud to announce the publication on 1 November 2022 of The Book of Unrest, the second collection of poems by Nick Mulgrew. An ocean of floodwater. Shipwrecked toddlers. Skeletons that rise from pristine beaches. In his second book of poems, Nick Mulgrew confronts the natural and human disasters of the eastern South African coast – and, in the process, himself. An unflinching examination of ancestry and place, of ruined childhoods and a troubled present, The Book of Unrest conjures a world of alternating beauty and horror; a series of tainted land-, city- and seascapes, increasingly hos ..read more

Jacques Coetzee has won the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for a debut collection in English with his book An Illuminated Darkness, published by uHlanga in 2020. The Ingrid Jonker Prize is awarded in alternate years to the best debut collection published in South Africa in English or Afrikaans. Twelve entries were received for the 2022 prize, which was judged by Malika Ndlovu, Ken Barris and Arja Salafranca. Judges of the Ingrid Jonker prize are unaware of each other’s identities until judging is complete. One of the judges praised the meditative tone of Coetzee’s collection, pointing out that Coetz ..read more

We are very proud to announce that Jacques Coetzee has been shortlisted for the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for his debut collection An Illuminated Darkness. The Ingrid Jonker Prize is one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary awards, awarded in alternate years to a first collection of poetry published in English or Afrikaans, the two languages in which Jonker herself wrote. It has been previously awarded twice to uHlanga authors Thabo Jijana in 2016 (for Failing Maths and My Other Crimes), and Saaleha Idrees Bamjee in 2020 (for Zikr). An Illuminated Darkness was published during the heig ..read more

Photo by Louis Kerckhof uHlanga and akono Verlag are proud to announce the upcoming translation of Kopano Maroga’s Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations into German. Maroga’s debut will be translated by Berlin-based writer, speaker and actor Ralph Tharayil, supported by the German Translator’s Fund, and will be published by akono, based in Leipzig. Since its publication in the hard-lockdown days of November 2020, Jesus Thesis has attracted rave reviews. South Africa’s News24 praised Maroga’s debut as both “harrowing” and “tender”, adding that “Jesus Thesis invites readers to investigate ..read more

Cover image by revel j fox Five years after the publication of Liminal, uHlanga is proud to announce the publication in June 2022 of A Short Treatise on Mortality, our second title by Douglas Reid Skinner, and the poet’s eighth title overall. Despite being based in England, Skinner is already very well known among South African poets as the editor of Stanzas magazine, and as the English language editor of the AVBOB Poetry Project. (And, in the late 80s and early 90s, the director of Carrefour.) Here, in a surprisingly humorous volume, Skinner’s lifetime of writing becomes the writing of a lif ..read more

We’re proud to announce that Athambile Masola’s debut collection of poems in isiXhosa, Ilifa, has won the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences award for Best Fiction (Poetry). An amazing result for poetry in isiXhosa! In addition, Kopano Maroga’s collection, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, was named on the shortlist. The awards were announced at a ceremony on 31 March 2022 at the Javett-UP Arts Centre. Thank you to the judges and organisers, and congratulations to the other winners ..read more