BOOKPATHS

South Africa

Lindesay Irvine talks with Henrietta Rose-Innes, this year’s ‘winner of the Caine prize for the best short story by an African writer in English.”

Rose-Innes's confidence is not misplaced. In starkly understated prose, 'Poison' zooms in on a motley crowd of Cape Towners marooned out of petrol at a middle-of-nowhere service station as people flee a chemical explosion in the city. Central character Lynn looks on numbly while her fellow refugees cut deals and improvise team efforts - across Cape Town's established social divides - to get away from the toxic smuts spreading across the veld. Something of a blank human space, Lynn baffles even herself by failing to take any of the possible escape routes. A compellingly enigmatic story, 'Poison's' few pages are also an eloquent vignette of the ‘new’ South Africa. – from “I Had an Inkling I Might Win,” by Lindesay Irvine, The Guardian

South Africa

Writer Julia Leigh explains why J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K is her “book of a lifetime.”

“Ozick's essay entitled 'The Sister Melons of JM Coetzee' served as my introduction to the Booker-Prize winning novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1984). What she wrote was so compelling that I immediately went to the university library, Aladdin's den, and borrowed the work.” – from “Book Of A Lifetime: Life and Times of Michael K, JM Coetzee,” by Julia Leigh, The Independent

South Africa

Short-listed for this year’s John Llewellyn Rhys prize, South African-born novelist Ceridwen Dovey explains how benefiting from apartheid, however indirectly, fuelled her passionate desire to write about injustice.”

South Africa

John Freeman meets Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer.

“At Gordimer's age, if they are lucky to have lived so long, many writers have stopped writing, or at least reassessing older books. But, stubbornly, Gordimer has refused to stop evolving. Born in 1923 in Springs, Transvaal, she read her way into political awareness. Not much later, she wrote her way into anti-racist activism, winning the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel, The Conservationist. When apartheid fell apart, it was speculated that her work would lose a certain vitality. Yet since 1994, the year South Africa had its first free elections, she has published eight books, adapting her focus, again, as the country's problems shifted to the Aids epidemic, poverty and crime.” – from “Interview: Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer,” by John Freeman, The Independent

South Africa

Rachel Donadio writes about “South Africa’s post-apartheid literary scene.”

“The state of the novel is hardly among South Africa’s top priorities, and yet in some ways its bill of health mirrors that of the culture as a whole.” – from “Post-Apartheid Fiction,” by Rachel Donadio, The New York Times