Litnet

"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."

The early bird gets the coffee and the doughnuts!

This first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation illuminates Rhodes’s vision for the expansion of imperialism in southern Africa, connecting politics and industry to internal development, and examines how this fueled a lasting white-dominated colonial society.

The 20th edition of the South African Literary Awards (SALA) honoured 49 South African writers, translators and other literary practitioners across 16 categories at a prestigious ceremony in Johannesburg on 11 November 2025.

"With less of his characteristic reserve and more rampant enjoyment, Sole shapeshifts in this collection, appearing as an old man, as a trogon, as a bee, as the sun, as the beloved – with a sideways wink between author and reader."

"At the heart of the novel lies a painful paradox: education, once a promise of progress, has become a burden in a country where opportunity has collapsed."

"I urgently need a copy of op weg na ku, but unfortunately it’s out of print. Could anyone help me?"

"And yet, of the 122 Nobel laureates in literature from 1901 to date, only 15, or 12%, are playwrights. Many, many more are the writers of fiction and novels. And at literary festival after literary festival here in South Africa, there are novelists galore and only occasionally the odd playwright."

"Beneath its quiet surfaces, Szalay’s novel probes the cultural unease of our time – the exhaustion of liberal optimism, the backlash angst against 'wokeness' and the waning of faith in collective redemption."

"It is not often that a volume of poetry captures the public imagination in South Africa. Yet, Siphokazi Jonas’s Weeping becomes a river has done just that. This is an unlikely and heartening success in a literary landscape where poetry is often treated as the private language of a select few. One wonders, inevitably, about the reasons behind this resonance."

"The first chapter also provides a vivid portrait of a cultural, linguistic and continental outsider’s journey to this most enigmatic of collections. That he is further unafraid of discussing his own missteps relative to working with the material, and of reflecting on major personal events that tie in with his research, such as his father’s passing from cancer while trying to start an academic career, marks this section as particularly moving."

"It did start as memoir, as many of my stories do. A draft of this was written as and when it happened. But a life story does not always a good short story make. I had this in my trunk for years, and when the opportunity to submit it for Power came around, I wove in the power cuts so that it had a literal symbol, and then realised I’d thematicised the voyage from disempowerment to empowerment of the women in the story."

"The weeklong journey the characters undertake provides a marvellous readymade itinerary for anyone wishing to follow the tour – although personally I think you’d need two weeks, not one!"

"Breyten Breytenbach is of virtually unparalleled stature in South Africa’s contemporary Afrikaans-language literary landscape."

"The next morning, there was a little AI niggle in my brain. What if? Could it be? Was it time to pack up and go teach English to little children in South Korea?"

"There is a freedom in speculative fiction that doesn’t exist in any other genre – anything can happen. That kind of freedom, once tasted, is addictive. And that is what fantasy has provided me – a place to articulate these stories fully. This particular story begins with a dream, possibly the oldest of all that is speculative."

"Morafe: Person, family and nation in colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s is a landmark achievement. Khumisho Moguerane has written a history that matters for our time by filling the lacunae in southern African historiography."

JM Coetzee: "I am a lighter – a more light-hearted – and a better person in Afrikaans."

"It was a pleasant reminder that there is an entire world out there that believes in African stories enough to give us two weeks to hammer out our plots and characters, vivify our paper worlds and bring them fully to life."