Litnet

"It is especially Unigwe’s rendition of each of her main characters’ uniqueness in circumstances, setting and personality – the absence of othering of the sex workers in an either sentimentalising or demonising manner – that achieves the novel’s powerfully humane purpose."

"The Paton Festival represents not only a fight for the principle of non-racialism in the arts and culture sector of South Africa, but also a fight over the blueprint of what a UNESCO City of Literature should look like."

Come and celebrate with Kwela! Thursday 28 February 2019, 18:30, Exclusive Books, Sandton. 

The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts (CCA) presents its 22nd annual Time of the Writer Festival from 13 to 16 March 2019. Celebrating Durban’s status as the UNESCO City of Literature, Time of the Writer 2019 offers a shining gem of a four-day festival that allows audiences, budding authors and literature lovers a chance to encounter some of South Africa’s most notable writers in some wonderfully curated up close and personal encounters.

"The early email correspondence between ... Karina Szczurek and ... writer André Brink is a romantic WikiLeak of sorts that gives readers detailed and minimally censored insight into their courtship. That the growing passion between them worked out as perfectly as both imagined, coming from different hemispheres, must be the ultimate romantic plot ..."

"We have to be 'hunter gatherers' – we need to hunt for truth and good food, then gather it and make it work for us – it can change your life. It changed mine."

Eva Mazza's debut novel Sex, Lies & Stellenbosch was recently launched at Gino's Stellenbosch. Eva was interviewed by her publisher Melinda Ferguson.

"Gazemba beautifully interweaves the rhythms of rural life with the impulses of individuals’ emotions. The lives he evokes are rich in feeling and the narrative voice, however compassionate, describes the poor without condescension or pity."

"The book exposes the inner workings of the poaching industry, laying bare the social structures that support the communities and people who participate." 

“Since the book is representative of all races, a variety of cultures, most religions and a fair range of age groups, the reader is treated to a number of colourful, multilayered views of our country.”

Anatoli by Tayfun Aras is not only a recipe book. It is a mini-memoir of his creative culinary life and a hearty diary of this much-loved niche restaurant in Cape Town, which was established in 1984.

"I like the idea of it being a whydunnit, but I really do hope that readers will land up liking Noah and understanding more about him. I think it’s really important that we see people as people, not as being defined by their conditions."

"The enumerations is certainly a novel that I recommend to anyone, especially anyone with an interest in psychology and the issue of OCD."

"Set in the highly populated township of Chatsworth in KwaZulu-Natal, this collection of 11 short stories highlights working class life in a residential area that was allocated for South Africans of Indian descent during apartheid."

"Imogen 'Genie' Zula Nyoni is a very special girl who grows into an incredible, defiant woman; her mother was a country and western singer, and her father was a freedom fighter who shot down an aeroplane during the war for liberation."

"The central question Boehmer addresses in Postcolonial poetics is 'whether there was a kind of reading that postcolonial texts in particular solicited' and, if yes, what its main characteristics were." 

"This is a triumphant, hopeful work of fiction, and Fisher deserves commendation for writing about such a difficult, stigmatised topic in a creative and gripping way."

"The history of intimacy by Gabeba Baderoon ... is the only poetry volume published by Kwela Books this year, but one which is a most welcome addition to the plethora of distinguished South African poetic voices."

"With considerable simplification, but highly persuasively in its sweepingly confident claims, Bofane’s account of the world’s continuously violent history from the late 19th until well into the 21st century places the Congo centrally at its heart of darkness, then and now."

"This book also gives one pause to reflect on whether it is worth it to try and keep up with a youth-obsessed society that makes unrealistic demands on how you spend your time and where, how your body should look (like Barbie) and how much you should have in your bank account."