Winner of the 2010 Ingrid Jonker Prize

‘a rich addition to English South African writing … there is not a single poem in this volume that does not expand the reader’s consciousness … this is a literary poetry, rich in ideas’ Ingrid Jonker Prize press release Continue reading Hyphen, by Tania van Schalkwyk →

This collection of coasts and journeys, creatures and dreams is so crafted, and simultaneously substantial and light, that to read it is to be a stone skimming water.

As an unpublished manuscript, Foundling’s Island shared the Sanlam Literary Award in 2003. Continue reading Foundling’s Island, by PR Anderson →

Whether describing the wonder and fright of a crab giving birth, a visit to the dentist, or an estuary full of bodies and shimmering birds, Arthur Attwell shows how the ghosts of our childhood, relationships, and the course of history continue to find and startle us.

“Here is a first collection which, combining the elegance and precision of an American master like Richard Wilbur, has an enviable capacity to contain very large matters in discrete forms.” Stephen Watson Continue reading Killing Time, by Arthur Attwell →

‘Undoubtedly one of the best debut volumes in South African poetry in recent years.’ Stephen Watson

Personae is a book of voices. In assuming the identities of a variety of figures, many from biblical history, Sarah Johnson speaks of the unspoken in their lives, revealing that often troubled point of intersection between the devotional and the erotic, and also the truth – poetic and otherwise – of Emerson’s dictum: “Many . . . can write better in a mask than for themselves.” This collection is remarkable in that its voices, speaking out of their own lives and histories, connect directly, acutely to ours. Continue reading Personae, by Sarah Johnson →

‘Kim McClenaghan is above all a lyric poet. Which is to say he writes chiefly of what he calls “landscapes of the heart”. And in this, his first collection of poems, he makes these landscapes palpable, indelible.’ Stephen Watson Continue reading Revisitings, by Kim McClenaghan →

‘There is in Fiona Zerbst’s poetry a vein of pure lyricism which, whether sorrowing or rejoicing, goes back as far, and as deep, as Sappho.’ Stephen Watson Continue reading Time and Again, by Fiona Zerbst →