Zebra Press brings you a preview of the exciting new collection of SA writing on hours and cities edited by Louis Greenberg, Home Away – to be launched in April. Watch out for the first pages of each of the 24 stories, which will be run in hourly sequence every day.
It’s 3 AM and Sarah Britten takes us to Sydney, Australia:
Home Away: 3 AM (Sarah Britten)
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Zebra Press brings you a preview of the exciting new collection of SA writing on hours and cities edited by Louis Greenberg, Home Away – to be launched in April. Watch out for the first pages of each of the 24 stories, which will be run in hourly sequence every day.
It’s 1 AM and SA Partridge takes us to Triolet, Mauritius:
Home Away: 1 AM (SA Partridge)
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Zebra Press brings you a preview of the exciting new collection of SA writing on hours and cities edited by Louis Greenberg, Home Away – to be launched in April. Watch out for the first pages of each of the 24 stories, which will be run in hourly sequence every day.
We start with midnight, Nairobi and Zukiswa Wanner:
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Home Away: Midnight (Zukiswa Wanner)
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Save the date! The Louis Greenberg-edited “book of cities and hours”, Home Away, will be launched on Thursday, April 15 at The Book Lounge in Cape Town.
This unique and captivating collection is a snapshot of South African writing today: emigrant and immigrant South Africans, living at home and away.
Here’s the brilliant line-up of contributors, the hours they’ve been assigned to and the cities they write about:
Midnight: Zukiswa Wanner (Nairobi)
1 am: S.A. Partridge (Triolet)
2 am: Richard de Nooy (Amsterdam/Rokytnice nad Yizerou)
3 am: Sarah Britten (Sydney)
4 am: Naomi Nkealah (Mainz)
5 am: Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (Havana)
6 am: Colleen Higgs (Kampala)
7 am: Moky Makura (Lagos)
8 am: Sarah Lotz (Maun)
9 am: Louis Greenberg (Ushuaia)
10 am: Fiona Snyckers (Oxford)
11 am: Lauren Beukes (Tokyo)
noon: Ted Botha (Los Angeles)
1 pm: Liesl Jobson (Victoria / the air)
2 pm: Jassy Mackenzie (Moscow)
3 pm: Makhosazana Xaba (Dakar)
4 pm: Jo-Anne Richards (Patmos)
5 pm: Henrietta Rose-Innes (Chanchan)
6 pm: Kathryn White (London)
7 pm: Karina Magdalena Szczurek (Salzburg)
8 pm: Ivan Vladislavic (Oklahoma City)
9 pm: Helen Moffett (Fairbanks)
10 pm: Rustum Kozain (Royaumont)
11pm: Victoria Burrows (Hong Kong)
Many of the authors will be on-hand at the launch to read from their selections. We look forward to seeing you there!
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It’s official! The much-anticipated compilation Home Away will be published by Zebra Press next month. Watch out for a special series related to the book on the Zebra Press blog starting next week – it will be “24″ with a twist!
Being South African isn’t as black and white as it used to be. People from all over the world make South Africa their home, while South Africans have more geographic freedom than ever before. This unique and captivating collection is a snapshot of South African writing today: emigrant and immigrant South Africans, living at home and away.
In Home Away, twenty-four chapters by twenty-four writers, set in cities all around the world, make up one global day, a mosaic reflecting on the nature of home. As the provocative stories in this collaboration suggest, often it’s when we are far away from home that we see it most clearly.
About the authors
The collaborators on Home Away are: Lauren Beukes, Ted Botha, Sarah Britten, Victoria Burrows, Richard de Nooy, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Louis Greenberg, Colleen Higgs, Liesl Jobson, Rustum Kozain, Sarah Lotz, Jassy Mackenzie, Moky Makura, Helen Moffett, Naomi Nkealah, SA Partridge, Jo-Anne Richards, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Fiona Snyckers, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Ivan Vladislavić, Zukiswa Wanner, Kathryn White and Makhosazana Xaba.
Louis Greenberg is a freelance writer, editor and web designer. His first novel is the well-received The Beggars’ Signwriters, and he has published several stories, photographs and poems. He has lived in Johannesburg all his life, and much of his travel is vicarious.
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Shown above: all 24 contributors
Diabetes is one of those scary words that make you break out in a cold sweat and leave you fearful of being dependent on medications and treatments. But there is life with a chronic illness like diabetes. Just ask author Bridget McNulty, who’s been living with diabetes since 2007 – and living it to the full, as Catherine Price discovered:
Bridget McNulty is a South African writer and journalist, and a Type 1 diabetic. Her first novel, Strange Nervous Laughter, was published in South Africa in 2007 and released in the USA in May 2009. She has written articles for a number of South African magazines, including ELLE, Real Simple, the Oprah magazine, Psychologies and Woman & Home, and frequently writes about diabetes. In 2008 she was voted one of Cosmopolitan magazine’s Awesome Women, an award extended to 30 South African women who are making a difference in their chosen field and inspiring other women to live their best lives.
Bridget is also a frequent blogger, both on her personal blog which was shortlisted for a South African Blog Award in 2008, and on ThoughtLeader, the Mail and Guardian’s exclusive blogging platform (www.thoughtleader.co.za/bridgetmcnulty).
She was diagnosed with diabetes in 2007 (at the age of 25) and, thanks to Apidra and Lantus insulin, has had excellent control ever since (her HbA1c results for the last year were 5.6 and 5.9). She also works as a champion for diabetes awareness in South Africa.
Bridget is a passionate writer intent on living the truth that people with diabetes can do anything they want to.
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Random House Struik and Zebra Press are proud to announce that Andrew Brown has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009 for Best Book in the Africa region for his novel, Refuge.
“I am absolutely thrilled that Refuge has been short-listed for the Africa region of the Commonwealth fiction awards and I am humbled and honoured to be associated with the names of all the previously short-listed writers. My writing is ultimately motivated by the invigoration I feel at living in this extraordinary continent – so to be included amongst the writers that Africa has produced, and continues to produce, is recognition beyond my most imaginative dreams,” said Brown.
The Commonwealth awards are aimed at promoting fiction that might otherwise not reach a wider audience, thereby increasing an appreciation of different cultures. Refuge is an attempt to address the seemingly ever-widening gap between locals and ‘foreigners’ within South Africa, and the concerning lack for appreciation that we display for the culture of others. It is my hope that the book will in some small way cause those who read it to reconsider their attitude towards the displaced and desperate bodies that inhabit the stairwells and alleyways around them” says Andrew Brown.
Marlene Fryer, Publisher of Zebra Press, says “We are thrilled about Andrew’s shortlisting. He is one of South Africa’s most exciting novelists, and this recognition is well deserved.”
Refuge will now go through to the next phase of the competition, where the Africa regional judging panel will meet to decide the two regional Commonwealth winners for Best Book and Best First Book. The regional winners will be announced at an event on 11 March in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Andrew Brown won the Sunday Times 2006 Fiction Prize for Coldsleep Lullaby and was shortlisted for the 2009 Alan Paton Award for Street Blues.
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Mervyn Sloman, proprietor of The Book Lounge – which hosted the launch of Andrew Brown’s new novel, Refuge, at the Centre for the Book in Cape Town yesterday – opened his remarks by citing the sales figures of another Brown. Dan Brown, that is, whose The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol have collectively sold into the gazillions.
That may be impressive, said Sloman, but tonight we are gathered at an altogether more significant event, the international launch of a new work by Andrew Brown. A pause. Then, to much cheering from the Centre’s packed main hall, “The better Brown”. Sloman announced the start of the The Better Brown Campaign, an educational initiative targeting booksellers – but more on that later.
Brown’s book incorporates a meditation on the plight of refugees in South Africa, who have never exactly been warmly welcomed here, and who suffered great losses during the spate of xenophobic attacks in 2008 – violence and intimidation that have continued to this day. The author accordingly desired that his launch be not just about a single book, but that it should feature a tapestry of voices, the voices of those who speak out against nationalist bigotry and violence against those who are different.
Enter MaAfrika Tikkun and the organisation’s Lizeka Rantsane, who introduced a dozen young women from the NGO, there to perform “Hold Me Tight, Fear Not My Skin”, a powerful, choreographed depiction of xenophobic violence and a call to action to promote greater understanding and the peaceful working out of differences. Here’s a clip from the opening scene:
Video: “My name is…” scene from “Hold Me Tight, Fear Not My Skin”
Another voice at the launch that attracted that admiration of the audience was Dale Yudelman’s, which spoke silently through his photographs, arranged around the room. The diptychs – snaps of personal ads placed in public spaces like supermarkets by non-South Africans looking for work, paired with haunting, black and white imagery – comprised part of Yudelman’s “I Am” exhibition and reinforced the evening’s central message about our collective humanity.
Every event must have a main act, however, and this came with Brown’s turn at the podium. He first read from Refuge – a passage in which the main character says to his (hired) Nigerian lover that what he lacks, in his life, is curiosity (the acoustics of the hall weren’t great, but give this clip a listen):
Video: Andrew Brown reads from Refuge
Brown segued from that passage into a story about how, twenty-five years ago, he stood on a hilltop in Tanzania, an exile who had fled apartheid South Africa after being released from Pollsmoor prison, and contemplated his country’s future. He was not particularly sanguine then – but things turned out differently from his expectations.
Brown continued: he’d recently returned to Tanzania on a motorcycle trip – but found that he wasn’t able to unfurl the South African flag that he’d taken with him, because he was too ashamed by our xenophobic episodes to put it proudly on display.
What can be done to thwart the expectations of so many Africans that last year’s violence has set? he asked. “We have to find our voice again, because terrible things happen when people stay silent.”
We’ve gone back into our shells, he continued: this week, for instance, “community eviction notices” were served on Burundians living in Du Noon. “Refuge is my small voice of outrage. We must use our fear,” he said – fear being a cognate, almost, for curiosity, its dark cousin in our quiver of emotions – “and use it to regain what we have lost” as a rainbow nation.
Brown thanked the Nigerians who had let him into their world when he was writing Refuge, and singled out his editor, Martha Evans, for especial praise, saying her name deserved to be on the book’s cover as much as his.
Back to Mervyn Sloman. To conclude the formalities, he outlined the main points of The Better Brown Campain. There are only four, and they’re quite simple:
Simple, not so? And a great way to reinforce the fact that, in Andrew Brown, South Africa has a writer who can take the nation on to the world stage.
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Zebra Press and Wordworth Books invite you to the second Cape launch for Andrew Brown’s Refuge.
Join the author and Cape Town books diva Jennifer Crocker for a discussion of this riveting new read at Wordsworth Waterfront. See you there!
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Zebra Press takes great pleasure in inviting you to the launch of Andrew Brown’s new novel, Refuge.
Refuge depicts the deceit and violence that characterise the meeting point between “illegal aliens” and “law-abiding society”. The stories revolves around Richard, a disillusioned lawyer who is tiring of his criminal practice, his unaffectionate wife and his condescending colleagues. He becomes infatuated with a beautiful Nigerian refugee who works as an erotic masseuse.
The launch will feature the performance of “Hold me tight, fear not my skin” by the Qala Ngam dance and drama youth group.
We hope to see you there!
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