Litnet

"It’s like a batsman playing his last test and scoring a hundred in the second innings. Or a bowler ending with 10 wickets in his last game."

We are delighted to announce the 2025 Island Prize shortlist.

Writer and alumna of the Jakes Gerwel/Oude Leeskamer residency programme, Lebogang Mazibuko, talks with our guest writer, Sihle Qwabe, about his writing process and the life experiences that inform his writing. Join us on 6 May from 15:30 to 17:00 for this conversation in Jannie se Leeskamer in exploration of Qwabe’s debut novel, The Resurrection.

"I asked if I could interview him about directing before he returned home, and he readily agreed. I opened a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau and turned on the tape recorder. I was 32 and Athol was 49."

Die wenners van die onderskeie pryse en toekennings van die Andrew Murray Desmond Tutu-prysfonds is nou bekend.

"Decima is a triumph of moral and aesthetic ambition. By entwining a species’s extinction with personal and national identity, Venter crafts a story that is simultaneously urgent and timeless. Its greatest achievement lies in making readers feel the weight of ecological collapse not as abstract data, but as the sum of countless individual tragedies, human and animal alike."

This arrangement promises to bring increased global visibility to Modjaji authors while maintaining Modjaji’s distinctive editorial vision and established local presence.

"If you thought Apeirogon, published in 2020, was the most pertinent book McCann could have written for our era, wait until you read his recent book, Twist, which came out this month."

We are delighted to announce the 2025 Island Prize longlist for a debut novel by an African writer. The Island Prize is an annual competition held by Holland House Books. It offers both a small monetary reward and assistance in navigating the difficult world of the publishing industry, such as working on the winning manuscript with the author and assisting them in approaching agents and publishers.

The Commonwealth short story prize is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction from any of the Commonwealth’s 56 Member States.

"If we mourn what needs to be mourned, we may find enough empathy to understand the legitimacy of calls for setting things in order that are based on natural justice. Only then, perhaps, we shall stop being angry with each other and begin healing from our historical traumas, and, per chance, even celebrate our history as part of our collective identity instead of as something that embarrasses us."

How do we know who we are? Upending the reader’s expectations of a memoir, Whyle then explores the violence and madness of apartheid society as the narrator passes through boarding school and university and takes his first steps to become a writer. ... At the end of history, on the shores of a blue bay, the voices of the past can be heard as we await the arrival of the barbarians – or the baboons, whoever comes first.

"But the main reason I do it is to see the joy on children’s faces. ... That unadulterated smaaail is because you’ve just gifted a young child a book. Entrance is free!"

"Vir Suid-Afrikaners bied 21 Voices ’n spieël vir hul eie verlede en ’n uitdaging vir die hede. Dit vra: Hoe kan ons, wat internasionale steun tydens apartheid ontvang het, nou solidêr wees met ander?"

Historical inequality affects entrepreneurship too. Knowledge and resources are still concentrated. Raymond Ledwaba is the founder and CEO of ITTHYNK Gaming and the co-founder of Diski Nine9. He successfully migrated from a career in banking to a life of entrepreneurship. Having not been exposed to a start-up environment, this was a plunge into the unknown. Read an excerpt here.

Do you sometimes worry that you have to choose a single career, discarding the bits of you that do not serve it? Read the useful tips Chantal Stewart has shared for sustaining creativity in the midst of a busy working life and let them feed your own creative fires.

Penny Haw is bekend vir boeke wat sterk, interessante en onafhanklike vroue uitbeeld, met ’n ruim verkenning van die onderlinge verbondenheid van alles wat lewe. Dit is ons plesier om haar op 9 April in Jannie se Leeskamer te verwelkom vir die bekendstelling van haar derde historiese roman, Follow me to Africa. Sluit by ons aan vir hierdie bekroonde skrywer se gesprek met Eva Mazza.

"While apartheid in South Africa may have been banished, 'apartheid' – separateness – is seeking to stretch its hideous tendrils around the globe. We seem to be retreating into spaces too small, surrounding ourselves with those who are seemingly similar."

"Will you now share your space with all the great writers you so admired and loved."