uHlanga is proud to distribute, on behalf of Crane River, the debut collection by Adré Marshall, Visitations. In a singular collection, Adré Marshall captures those intense encounters that take on the significance of a ‘visitation’. The poems are lyrical, humorous and elegiac by turn, even all three at once, and in her exploration of the complex interactions between people and the natural world, she finds many reasons in our modern times for both disquiet and consolation. Poet Finuala Dowling writes that Marshall’s collection exhibits a “deep thematic connectedness that runs throughout... abo ..read more

Karavan Press and uHlanga are proud to announce the release of Dayspring, a memoir by the renowned South African-English poet and novelist C. J. Driver, edited and with a foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee. The book releases on 1 July 2024 in South Africa. Dayspring is a recollection of Driver’s South African youth – his childhood as a reverend’s son in Kroonstad and Grahamstown-Makhanda preceding his extraordinary student years at the University of Cape Town, during which he edited the student newspaper Varsity and became enmeshed in radical student politics. As president o ..read more

We’re proud to share the news that Kopano Maroga’s sacred and profane debut, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, has been translated into German, and is out on 30 September 2023 from our good friends at akono Verlag. The translator of the text is Ralph Tharayil, a bilingual Swiss writer, translator and director of South Indian origin living in Berlin. Tharayil works in the fields of text, performance and audio, and writes prose, radio plays and poetry. Congratulations to Kopano, and we wish Die Jesusthese much success in German-speaking Europe ..read more

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