Literary Fire

It was 2012 in the Cape Flats in Mfuleni. Demanding better police services in Khayelitsha, community activists Angy Peter and Isaac Mbadu were raising their young family. However, the tables turned when the Khayelitsha Commission started…

The Abantu Book Festival officially kicked off today and will continue on until Sunday the 9th. For those who don’t already have their tickets ready or are unsure if a literary festival is really for them, we’ve compiled a list of reasons…

Much of history is told from the position of “Big Men” who oft gloss over or ignore the contributions made by women and the working class. This is not true of Panashe Chigumadzi’s new book These Bones Will Rise Again. In a beautiful essay…

Storyteller, immigrant, copywriter, and cookbook author - for Ming-Cheau Lin it is all these different identities that have come together in the writing of her Taiwanese-South African cookbook Just Add Rice. Released in 2018, the book is a…

“My life has seen cycles of abandonment and abuse, sexual exploitation and domestic violence. But my story begins before I was born, because my mother was caught up in a similar cycle when she was a girl, writes Grizelda Grootboom in her…

World history remembers certain people better than others. Our records are dominated by white men from the West who supposedly led, conquered, and created the world as we know it. Zing Tsjeng’s Forgotten Women series challenges the way we…

Muslim, American, Pakistani-Kashmiri, poet, writer - in her debut poetry collection, Fatimah Asghar reflects on navigating those identities through questions of race, history, sexuality, and nationality. If They Come For Us  - released in…

Can a person who was enslaved ever be free? This is the question Canadian author Esi Edugyan grapples with in her masterpiece novel: Washington Black. The book tracks the journey of a gifted young boy born into slavery on a Barbados…

I Want To Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis is a collection of 13 narrations that looks at the lives and stories of people in the city of Johannesburg. Edited by journalist Tanya Pampalone…

When Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela passed away on 2 April this year we, as South Africans, didn’t quite know what to do with her legacy. Opinion was polarised. There were those who wanted Mama Winnie to atone for the dark events that she…

Co-authors of Poacher: Confession from the abalone underworld, Kimon de Greef and Shuhood Abader look visibly tired as we sit down for our interview about their book. They later tell me this is the fifth interview for the day. It’s easy to…

Writers have expressed solidarity with prominent Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa who was detained and then deported by Israel. Israel blocked the writer from attending the Kalimat Palestinian Literature Festival held in her…

Rekgotsofetse Chikane wants to tell the story of his experience of Rhodes Must Fall. That’s the impression I get from the conversation I had with the former University of Cape Town (UCT) student leader, and his book “Breaking A Rainbow,…

Walk into any bookstore and expect to pay anything from R150 to R1500 for book. But why are books so expensive, or are they not that expensive in comparison to other things? We asked publishers. Are books expensive in South Africa?…

Books are expensive. There is no denying that most books sold at mainstream book stores or online are astronomically expensive. People just can’t afford to spend over R300 at minimum for a single book. Yet, the importance of reading and…

Reading Rosie Motene’s biography, Reclaiming The Soil: A black girl’s struggle to find her African self feels like catching up with a friend you haven’t seen for many years. FATIMA MOOSA takes a deeper look at the themes in the book.…

It’s always a marvellous thing when a really good book is turned into a film. Aside from the inevitable argument about which story was told better, it’s always fun. 2018, in particular, has been a great year for book-to-film adaptations.…

Born and bred in Cape Town, Qarnita Loxton started writing as a way of keeping herself busy. Being a shy child, she had always written as a way of expressing herself without having to speak. Now with a second book in her repertoire, Loxton…

Mohale Mashigo’s latest literary offering Intruders is a rollercoaster of a read. Moving from monster-chasing in Bloemfontein to escaping the end of Earth to outer space, Intruders is the stories of individuals who are all on the fringes of…

Full-time freelance photographer and writer, Saaleha Idrees Bamjee has released her debut poetry collection, Zikr. She said she has always been a writer from the time she first read Roald Dahl in primary school. With Zikr, Bamjee tackles…