Litnet

"Athol was spending increasingly longer periods working away from South Africa, but he always returned home to write. He told me he couldn’t write anywhere else. He had to be at home."

"Can Xue’s writing operates on the logic of dreams, and as such, the experience of reading I live in the slums is one of continuous disorientation."

On Sunday, 23 February 2025, the life and work of Breyten Breytenbach – who passed away on 24 November 2024 – was celebrated at the Breytenbach Sentrum in Wellington. Herewith the text version of Francis Galloway’s talk as part of the event.

The programme for Amazwi’s 2025 Literature Heritage Ecology Conference has arrived. There is a great range of papers from a wide range of disciplines.

"Theft is the first novel Abdulrazak Gurnah has released since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021. Epic in a true sense of the word, it follows the intertwining lives of three Tanzanians, Badar, Karim and Fauzia, and their coming of age in the fast-changing world of Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania."

The 2025 edition of the Adam Small festival was staged in Pniël from 21 to 23 February. Festival impresario Darryl David shares his thoughts and photographs.

In Desire at the end of the white line Azille Coetzee examines a range of contemporary Afrikaans popular culture texts to demonstrate how the stories that white Afrikaans women tell about themselves keep them white and apart. In this video, she discusses her research with Lou-Marié Kruger. AB Jantjies was the videographer for LitNet.

The run-away success of Simon’s Town’s two previous literary festivals has inspired a knockout line-up for 2025. The town is set to host some of South Africa’s most celebrated writers on 14, 15 and 16 March. The festival’s 24 diverse events range from readings, panel discussions and a poetry soirée with more than 30 South African and international writers, and winners of all major literary prizes in South Africa.

The Jakes Gerwel Foundation offers, in partnership with Huisgenoot and LitNet, a mentorship programme to promising emerging short story writers.

When writing a poem, do you feel you have to record everything you think and feel about a particular topic, so that your readers will know exactly how they ought to think and feel about it too? Peter Anderson, an associate professor of English at the University of Cape Town, shares a poem that shows how important mystery and understatement are to any creative enterprise.

"I felt it important to present an alternative version to the highly readable one he so strongly portrays. We are all different and our experiences of, and reactions to, similar circumstances can differ widely. That said, this is probably the best book that I have read in a long time."

What makes The Otto Foundation’s book prize unique is that young readers play an active role in selecting the winning titles. Following a nomination process held last year, the shortlisted titles were included in the Otto Foundation’s annual Reading Relay, which is hosted every year among six schools in the District Six area in Cape Town.

Today, on the tenth anniversary of André Brink’s death (6 February) we pay tribute to his life and work and announce that the Philida Literary Award, established in his memory in 2020, goes to Hedley Twidle and is awarded to him for an oeuvre of literary excellence.

Open Book Festival announces its third annual Youth Festival, building on the momentum of previous years to create an even more dynamic celebration of youth literature and creativity. Youth Fest 2025 will run from 19 to 26 March 2025 and promises to bring together established and emerging voices in children’s and young adult literature, fostering a love of reading and writing among young people across Cape Town. 

"There is an honesty within these pages that is rarely seen in memoirs and politically slanted texts from the African literary scene." 

"Eurotrash, by the Swiss-German author Christian Kracht, is a novel of ideas and what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). It is about the grinding burden of having been born into tainted privilege, and the engulfing guilt that comes with that self-realisation."

Starting in 2025, the all-new AVBOB Prize for Best Published Collection of Poetry (by an individual poet) will shine a spotlight on South African poets with a R10 000 prize, honouring their artistic vision, linguistic mastery, and unique contributions to the country’s cultural tapestry.

The annual Literature, Heritage and Ecology Conference hosted by Amazwi South African Museum of Literature aims to foster cooperation and interaction between the humanities and the sciences and so help mitigate the social-ecological crises we face today.

"Frank Anthony’s activism was not just a political endeavour; it was a deeply emotional and personal commitment to the pursuit of freedom and justice ... With each word penned in defiance, each poem recited in solidarity, Anthony poured his heart and soul into the struggle, knowing that the price of freedom was steep, but believing fervently in its worth."

Architect Sir Herbert Baker left an indelible mark on South Africa and much of the British Empire in the first half of the 20th century. This is the first full biography from childhood and was written with full cooperation from his family and with access to his archive and private papers.