Litnet

"Intermezzo’s quieter wisdom feels unforced and unhurried – and all the more real and tangible for it."

"Diana was more than a poet. She was a moral compass, a voice for the silenced, and a healer who transformed pain into purpose through language. Her work carried the power to restore dignity, to confront injustice, and to inspire healing across generations."

"Roger Lucey’s How to build a house in the mountains is a book about constructing a legacy from your own ruins."

As a young man in a close-knit Muslim community in Woodstock, Muhammad used to feel trapped between who he was and who he was expected to be. But then he met Riyaaz, and his world shifted in unexpected ways. Haram is an unflinching tale alive with hidden and unspoken desires.

Get ready to share the magic and celebrate the joy of reading aloud.  World Read Aloud Day (WRAD) is celebrated internationally on Wednesday, 4th February 2026, and we want you to be a part of the celebration.

"The poetry whisperer’s workshop is the takeaway from a project inspired by Alison Gwynne Evans, head of the Western Cape Branch of SACEE (the South African Council for English Education). ... Central to the workshop is the idea that the future of poetry should be affirmed, even in times where AI is set to challenge all areas of human endeavour."

"Here we are, thirty-two years into our so-called non-racial, non-sexist democracy premised on human rights that are enshrined in our Constitution, and we have the minister responsible for arts and culture essentially banning an artist from participating in the Venice Biennial, because in his view, her work does not contribute to social cohesion in the country."

"The lesson of history is clear: When political anxieties dictate who may speak, the marketplace of ideas collapses. Every writer’s freedom suffers, not just that of the one targeted."

"Ultimately, this collection is about luck, about how your place in the world is more than just a cosmic accident, and about how you can never, ever outrun your history or fate."

Widely recognised as one of the most influential African writers of her generation, NoViolet Bulawayo was honoured for her short story "Hitting Budapest".

"Don’t expect even a sliver of sensationalist true crime, well-worn clichés that aren’t turned inside out, or gratuitous violence for its own sake. This is resolutely no pornographic exhibition of suffering, and the scheming that does happen is in keeping with the nature and motivation of the characters involved."

"Flesh, Booker winner, strips away its surface, only to reveal astonishing depths below."

"Cassim writes as an insider about local Indian people, about community, about custom and ritual, and about the precarious comforts and sometimes deeply uncomfortable business of being part of a family. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, and 'found family' is certainly a thing."

"This a joke book – except that all the dialogue is real, and from my family, over a period of fifteen years. I have been taking notes."

"For now, I continue reading – lifting the dust of archives, tracing the moral DNA of empires. The covenant demands it. And dust, after all, is where every story of human belonging begins."

He grew up in a good household near Durban. At a delicate age, he learned that he was adopted. It shook his sense of identity, as he no longer was the boy he had been brought up to be. In his recently completed memoir, Lucky bastard, Anthony Akerman focuses primarily on how his life was shaped by the knowledge of his adoption.

One of the songs from her 2013 album Change your world is called “My leaves stay green”. This song was written during her journey through chemotherapy. It is also the title of her recently published book of “poetree”, a collection of pop-up poems inspired by trees that she shared on Facebook during the COVID lockdown.

Amazwi intends to produce a peer-reviewed and edited electronic edition of the conference proceedings. The submission process will be shared with those whose abstracts are accepted for the conference.

"In tackling the hopscotch existence of a complicated man who has generated competing and conflicting opinions, Albert Grundlingh has produced a meticulously researched, highly readable and very well-rounded portrayal of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert."

"The best writers are not merely stylists; they are custodians of sensibility. They bring with themselves the heaviness of culture, memory, grief, humour, private ghosts, inherited silences and the rest of the untranslatable textures of lived experience. They write from the grain of their mother tongue. They write from provincial landscapes that the internet has never indexed, not yet anyway. They write from the pain of exile, from the taste of a city’s dust and from history that refuses to be archived. AI, for all its omnivorous reading, knows only what is online."