Litnet

"I see salt and smoked paprika; 
people content with their fortune, 
genuine, kind and unpretentious, 
like the pot of vegetable soup" 

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"What she conveys (sometimes emphatically and sometimes more obliquely) in this text is a conviction that a culture needs both growth and pruning – as a living thing that should adapt to its surroundings. If tradition stalls and hardens into ideology, it stultifies rather than nurtures both communal and individual life."

"What I love about this cookbook is not only the fact that a teenage boy has brought such a marvellous gift to the world, but that I, as a reader, am treated to delightful glimpses of Muako’s life."

"Here’s to Tali’s #babydiary building on this great start and taking South African television to a next level."

"Every South African city is already ringed by giant shack settlements, almost all erected on land that was illegally grabbed at the outset, and some still technically subject to eviction. But on the ground, everyone knows this will never happen."

"Violence begets violence. Samuel has been exposed to it from a young age through the different stages that his country has gone through politically, and through the effects of those changes on him and those around him."

"A mother’s tears will never clean the stains 
From off his shirt, or the shame that’s buried in 
Our dirt, deep in the soil; our country’s land 
Is poorer now, forevermore, without that 
Little hand."

"Karin Schimke and Karen Jeynes, both award-winning writers, pull out all the stops in The Karen Book of Rules and have a field day unleashing unbridled wit, humour, satire, sarcasm, and numerous lists of do’s and don’ts on their readers, presenting them with the choice 'to be a karen or not to be a karen.'"

"Viewing place names as linguistic and cultural heritage artefacts, we need to consider what it means to document and use these alternative names. Not only are we interested in how these names come into being, but also the roles they perform in social dynamics."

The Philida Literary Award is awarded annually to a writer mid-career for an oeuvre of between three and five books of any genre.

"The paragraph above sums up for me the life of a woman writer who has to work while being the mainstay of a family. Even Jane Austen mentioned in her diaries how she wrote her novels in short bursts, hiding her work under a book when others came into the room, trying to find continuity between family interruptions."

"Waves of dunes continue into the desert
– death traps in the shifting sands.
Here, compass bearings start to waver 
and directions become unclear."

"The vast open farms of youth,
where horizons were clear
and bush trails led to secret hideouts."

"We are enveloped in a hollow sky.
Our search for truth unmasks the void
and its uncertain quantum probabilities"

"Ivermectin exploits this communication system: it makes it impossible for the different parts of a worm or other parasite to talk to each other."

"Sometimes in the middle of the night
I am awakened – desperate and confused.
Was it an echo of her voice I heard
or just someone shouting in the street?"

"The lights go out – an electricity failure –
the canvas becomes a ghostly surface.
Lingering shapes suspended in the dark –
your portrait waiting to be drawn."

"What gives his book its especially concentrated quality is its microscopic examination of a body of ideological fragments – visionary novels, poems, pamphlets, manifestos and other documents – some of them fairly trivial, it could be said. These direct our attention to an alternative tradition of South African political literature, enthusiastically radical in its stance and resolutely internationalist in its inspirational reach."

"The night is an ancient stellar theatre
where cosmic symphonies are heard.
It has an orchestra without a conductor
playing music in counterpoint"