Litnet

John Kani: "This white man is here to suck their brains out!" Athol Fugard, the Grand Man of South African Literature, will turn 92 on Tuesday, 11 June 2024. Rory Riordan is writing a biography of the man who earned the title of "the foremost active playwright in the English-speaking world".

"The decision that charts our collective future in South Africa is now in the hands of politicians. This frightens me."

In April this year, the AVBOB Poetry Project ran a mini-competition on the theme "Three Ways to Look at a Person". We are announcing the names of the three winning poets and sharing their powerful words.

"If an essay is good, one distrusts it straight away. I did not award a single distinction."

"It would be easy in South Africa today, preoccupied as it is with the result of its own parliamentary election, to overlook the importance of the Allied D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, which liberated the world from the Nazi scourge. But that would be a mistake."

"Crucially, graduates are anticipated to embody critical thinking skills, and so actively contribute to societal development and progress. Higher education plays a vital role in cultivating virtues such as respect, resilience, dignity, inclusivity and gender equality, thereby fostering a constructive platform for public discourse. Universities serve as a safeguard against crude, anti-democratic rhetoric."

"Although Schreiner’s ideas about the place of women, the stratified nature of their labour, constantly developed over the course of her life, she evidently has a blind spot in her letters about the non-white servants in her close circle."

Here is a Zoom link for each day of the conference. Please find the programme for the Amazwi Children’s Literature Conference. 

One man shows: The Mbeki HIV Renaissance (2000-2009) is the third book in the series by Pieter-Dirk Uys/Evita Bezuidenhout and welcomes the new century with a detailed focus on the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa.

"This note will address these developments in terms of 'Winners' and 'Losers', and of course we must begin with the first of the election’s big stories, the travails of the ANC."

The Jakes Gerwel Foundation, LitNet and Huisgenoot are eagerly awaiting applications from promising emerging writers for the Kommadagga Workshop on the fine art of writing short prose.

"Darlings of Durban is a great holiday read. While it deals with serious issues in some of the relationships of the women, the novel is not meant to be scoured for national political commentary."

"I don’t get a vote in the South African elections, but in life – globally – I vote for tolerance and integrity. Literary beauty offers both."

"Nothing grows here now except silence and birdsong by day and the call of the jackal by night."

The lovely Karoo town Cradock will play host to Deon Meyer, Coenie de Villiers and André Schwartz from 12 to 15 June 2024. That is when the Schreiner Karoo Writers Festival will take place.

The Commonwealth Foundation has announced five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the world’s most global literary prize. 

"Perhaps the country most deeply affected by the ICC warrants, other than Israel itself, would be the USA. While itself not an ICC states party, US criticism of the Palestine case – in light of its previous support for the ICC warrants against Putin and Bashir, among others – exposes not only its double standards, but the shallowness of its much-touted moral compass."

Will voting be based on competence or identity? Freek Robinson talks to William Gumede, chairperson of the multiparty convention.

"But suddenly the agenda has become denser and more complex. International issues, bad old South African racial politics, and opportunistic political engineering have all made an appearance. So let’s pinpoint some of the key issues."

From 30 May – 14 June 2024, the acclaimed St Olaf Choir (USA), under the baton of its renowned conductor Anton Armstrong, will tour South Africa, with eight concerts and numerous choir collaborations and workshops in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Soweto, KZN and Cape Town. Composed of 75 mixed voices, the St Olaf Choir is hailed as one of the USA’s premier a cappella ensembles, renowned for its artistry and beauty of sound.