South Africa

Pearl of the Sea and KARIBA started as animation but ended as graphic novels—the former the first by Triggerfish Studios. Graphic novels are a “three-dimensional experience of literature,” said their publisher, Catalyst Press’ Jessica Powers. “Maybe we’re on the cusp of a trend across the African continent.”

The author of the short story collection If You Keep Digging on activism, the social power of literature, and South Africa’s need for change.

The lawyer and the doctor on podcasting, documenting South Africa’s Black voices, and getting African literature its own due.

It goes to “an oeuvre of literary excellence” in South Africa.

The Booker Prize winner is on the February 2022 cover of Open Country Mag.

How the South African naturalist, a prodigy, innovated major work on masculinity, race, memory, and time—and then, at the tip of his 40-year career, came the Booker Prize.

In his 40th year as a writer, last year’s Booker Prize winner talks to Open Country Mag about his artistic process, and his novel The Promise.

The novel, set in South Africa and China, has been compared to fiction by Teju Cole and Zinzi Clemmons.

He testified before the Zondo Commission. “I implicated 39 parties in my testimony so threats could come from many places,” he said. “I’ve faced alienation by corporate South Africa, from the university where I taught ethics. . . and I’ve been let down by many friends.”

The event will feature notable South African poets reading their work.

The event, announced by the Vice Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, will be virtual.

Edited by Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon, the country’s first essay collection on contemporary Black feminisms features Panashe Chigumadzi, Sisonke Msimang, and Yewande Omotosho.

In his most recent book, The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers, the South African journalist and activist shows a world in redescription. And he has been doing that for decades, engaging power and who wields it and who is abused by it.

The author of the memoirs Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts and The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life and editor of The New Strand was ahead of her time.