catal ogue

MAKING RAIN FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS

MODJAJI BOOks PO Box 385 Athlone, 7760 Cape Town, South Africa cell tel fax modjaji.books@gmail.com +27 (0) 72 774 3546 +27 (0) 21 696 5503 +27 (0) 86 517 9066

www.modjajibooks.co.za

blog http://modjaji.bookslive.co.za

South African Distributor

Blue Weaver Specialist Publishers Representatives PO Box 30370, Tokai, South Africa, 7966 Tel: +27 (021) 701 4477 Fax Local: 0865242139 Fax International: 0927865242139 Email: marketing@blueweaver.co.za www.oneworldbooks.com www.yourbooks.co.za

An independent publishing company based in Cape Town, South Africa. Started by Colleen Higgs in 2007, we publish books by southern African women writers. We publish novels, short stories, memoir, biography, poetry, essays, narrative non-fiction and relevant non-fiction by new, established, and award-winning women writers with brave voices. The history of publishing in South Africa is enmeshed with the culture of resistance that flourished under apartheid. "Struggle" literature may have emerged from the "underground", but women's voices particularly black women's voices are still marginalised. Modjaji Books addresses this inequality by publishing books that are true to the spirit of Modjaji the rain queen: a powerful female force for good, growth, new life, regeneration.

African Books Collective distributes Modjaji Books internationally

All Modjaji titles are available as e-books from a variety of e-tailers, such as Kindle, I-Tunes store, www.littlewhitebakkie.com and many others.

PO Box 721 Oxford, OX1 9EN, United Kingdom Tel & Fax: +44 (0) 1869 349110 www.africanbookscollective.com

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c ata l o gue
m odjaji b o o ks
Jabulani means Rejoice: A dictionary of South African names The reckless sleeper Beyond the Delivery Room To All the Black Women we knew Shooting Snakes One Green Bottle My First Time Personal stories by a range of women on a variety of sexual experiences Bom Boy Snake Bom Boy Whiplash Got No Secrets Go Tell the Sun The Bed Book of Short Stories 7 7 8 8 9 9 9 9 9 10 11 12 12 13 14 15 THIS PLACE I CALL HOME The Thin Line SWIMMING WITH COBRAS ELOQUENT BODY UNDISCIPLINED HEART HESTER SE BROOD Jabulani means Rejoice: A dictionary of South African names INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE Hemispheres Reclaiming the L-Word BARE & BRAKING AT LEAST THE DUCK SURVIVED WOMAN UNFOLDING fourth child Difficult Gifts 16 16 17 18 19 19 20 20 21 22 23 24 24 25 25 missing THE EVERYDAY WIFE Conduit The Suitable Girl THE ARE THE LIES I TOLD YOU PIECE WORK removing PLEASE, TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS STRANGE FRUIT Oleander BURNT Offering Life in Translation 26 26 27 27 28 28 29 29 30 30 31 31

hands on book s
LOOKING for Trouble ABSENT TONGUES Difficult to Explain LAVA LAMP POEMS A Lioness at my Heels SMALL PUBLISHER's catalogue 34 35 36 36 37 37

NEW RELEASES

NEW RELEASES

Dawn Garisch
A deeply insightful text that draws art and science, poetry and medicine, writing and healing into fertile conversation. - Ivan Vladislavic

Colleen Higgs
Short stories about young people living in in Yeoville in the last days of apartheid South Africa.

Kelwyn Sole
Absent Tongues is Kelwyn Sole's sixth collection of poems. Rustum Kozain describes Sole as "our national conscience"..

Danila Botha
In Got No Secrets, Danila Botha takes us into the private lives of twelve different women, with only one question in mind: What if these women were you?

More on Page 35

More on Page 19
2012 MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920397-39-5 284 pp 2012 SHORT STORIES ISBN: 978-1-920397-42-5 96 pp

More on Page 36
2012 POETRY 80 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-40-1

More on Page 14

2011 COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES 144 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-41-8

Rosemary Smith
"A vivid, highly personalised account of a few extraordinary white, middle class women in small town apartheid South Africa, which offers new insight into the struggle against apartheid." Jacklyn Cock

Karin Schimke
Powerful, exquisitely written poetry about the end of a marriage and the trauma of divorce.

Phumzile Simelane

More on Page 24

Jabulani means Rejoice: A dictionary of South African names

A comprehensive musthave resource for all South Africans, an ideal gift for parents-to-be.

More on Page 12

More on Page 18
2011 MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920397-37-1 186 pp

2012 POETRY 84 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-97-5

2011 REFERENCE ISBN 978-1-920397-37-1 186 pp

FORTHCOMING

FORTHCOMING

Hester van der Walt

The popular memoir and bread-making journey and manual now in English for the first time.
English edition to be released in 2012

Khadija Heeger

Kholofelo Maenetsha
A debut novel by an exciting new writer, giving a startling insight to the lives of black South African women - think Sindiwe Magona, think Cynthia Jele.

Debi Nixon

Beyond the Delivery Room

Popular performance poet, Khadija Heegers debut collection of poems.

To All the Black Women we knew

One Green Bottle

A deeply disquieting novel about mental illness and how institutions that are meant to heal really work.

2012 MEMOIR, COOKERY BOOK ISBN 978-1-920590-00-0

2012 POETRY ISBN 978-1-920397-36-4

2012 FICTION ISBN 978-1-920590-07-9

2012 MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920590-06-2

Toni Strasbourg

Haidee Kruger

Fractured Lives

The memoir of film-maker Toni Strasburg, daughter of Rusty and Hilda Bernstein, offers a fresh perspective on the life of families of activist exiles from apartheid.

The reckless sleeper

One of the most promising new poets of her generation.

Maren Bodenstein

Jennifer Thorpe (ed)

Shooting Snakes

Maren Bodensteins novel opens up new territory in South African fiction.

My First Time Personal stories by a range of women on a variety of sexual experiences

an eclectic mix of stories and voices telling the truth about sexuality and bodies.

2012 MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920590-09-3

2012 POEMS ISBN 978-1-920590-31-4

2012 FICTION ISBN 978-1-920590-01-7

2012 NARRATIVE NON-FICTION, MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920590-04-8

FORTHCOMING

FICTION

2011

Makhosazana Xaba

Reneilwe Malatji

Running and other stories

Love, Interrupted

Omotoso was born in Barbados and raised in Nigeria. She has a Nigerian father, West Indian mother and two brothers. She is an architect; space and buildings being a passion of hers second to literature. She lives in Cape Town working as a designer, writer and novelist.

Bom Boy
Yewande Omotoso
Leke is a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Bom Boy is a well-crafted, and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding of both the smallness and magnitude of a single life.
Bom Boy surprises and delights, sings at turns, as it straddles the past and the present, bringing into focus cultural beliefs while examining the intimacies and complexities of bonds of family and friendship. What strikes me most is the originality. This fine debut, firmly rooted in contemporary consciousness, is story-telling of note which whets the appetite for more. Joanne Hichens, author of This is a novel bursting with elegance, written by a young author brimming with genuine promise. Yewande Omotoso is a stylist with a literary vision. Nuruddin

2012 SHORT STORIES/ FICTION ISBN 978-1-920590-16-1

2012 SHORT STORIES ISBN 978-1-920590-08-6

Divine Justice

2011 NOVEL 264 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-35-7

Farah, author of Links, Knots & Crossbones

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2011
Tracey Farren lives in Cape Town with four dogs, a surfer and her three children. She has a psychology honours degree and worked as a freelance journalist before turning to fiction. Her debut novel, Whiplash, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2009.

FICTION
Tracey Farren lives in Cape Town with four dogs, a surfer and her three children. She has a psychology honours degree and worked as a freelance journalist before turning to fiction. Her debut novel, Whiplash, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2009.

FICTION

2008

Snake
Tracey Farren
When the luminous stranger arrives on the farm, twelve year old Stella is convinced that Jerry has come to heal her family. Now she tells the terrible trouble to a tabloid journalist in an effort to save the little that is left. The stage contains a metal wash tub, a traumatised child and a hard-hearted journalist. The script veers between love and violence, shining a naked bulb on psychosis and the preposterous ways in which people express their shame. Snake is a tabloid tale told in a young girls voice; sincere, anxious and human.
Tracey Farren has shown in her first novel, Whiplash, about prostitutes and others in Muizenberg, that she has a true gift for getting into the hearts of very ordinary people while astutely setting the South African sociopolitical context. In Snake she does it again, even better. ...Farrens creation of Stellas voice never falters as she examines the evil consequences of old lies and temptations and sets them up in a balance with decency and goodness in this seemingly artless, yet absolutely riveting read. Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian

Bom Boy
Tracey Farren

Whiplash

An unputdownable, gripping debut novel, a Cinderella story about a Muizenberg (Cape Town) prostitute, Tess, who while being addicted to painkillers and selling her body on the street finds redemption in unexpected places. Her quirky humour, honesty and love of beauty save her when she faces tough choices. The book has heart and a feel-good factor in spite of its gritty and sometimes traumatic subject matter.
Shortlisted for

Tracey Farrens striking debut novel gives a visceral, street smart and wonderfully authentic voice to the difficulties faced by women who are victims of poverty, abuse and stigmatisation. Sunday Times Whiplash digs its nails into you from the word go raw, tender and laugh-out-loud funny a kickarse gem of a book. Told with startling poetry in the grittiest of emotional landscapes, Whiplash puts Farren on the map as a wordsmith of astonishing talent. Joanne Fedler, author of When Hungry Eat marks the debut of a startling new voice on the South African literary scene. The Star
Recipient of White Ribbon Award in December 2008 from Women Demand Dignity Advocacy Group.

2011 NOVEL 272 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-38-8

12

The book is a kaleidoscope of the weird and wonderful traumatised children, psychopaths, murder, broken parents, missing police-officers, fanatical nuns, friendly snakes, a rooster called Mugabe, a beautiful flute, a fat German lady, a ruthless tabloid journalist, sordid love-making and a sometimes intolerable level of suspense. After reading this equally disturbing and redemptive book, you will feel pushed off centre, but drawn to your deepest self again. Beth Shirley, Sunday

Independent

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2011
Danila Botha was born in Johannesburg, and moved to Canada in her teens. She studied Creative Writing at York University and at Humber School for Writers, both in Toronto. She volunteered at two organizations benefitting the homeless, which inspired many of the stories.

FICTION
Co-published with Tightrope Books (CAN)

FICTION
Wame Molefhe started writing short stories in 2005. She freelances for a number of publications and also writes for TV. Just Once, her childrens collection of short stories was published in 2009. Go Tell the Sun is her second short story collection.

2011

Got No Secrets
Danila Botha
A startling and original new voice that owes as much to Black Flag and Bikini Kill as it does to J.D. Salinger and Heather ONeill. A South African copywriter is transplanted to the urban jungle of Manhattan. A recovering rape victim tries to resume a normal life. A Toronto nurse cuts herself to fill her emptiness. In Got No Secrets, Danila Botha takes us into the private lives of twelve different women, with only one question in mind: What if these women were you? From addiction to abuse, from childhood to suicide, from Hillbrow, Johannesburg, to downtown Toronto, Bothas prose is compassionate, provocative, often funny, and always fearless.
These stories grab you by the throat and don't let you go, bearing witness to lives in which self-destruction and hope are like symbions, each feeding the other.

Go Tell the Sun

Wame Molefhe
Wame Molefhes stories have a gentle, unassuming yet intimate and captivating feel to them. Set in Botswana, the stories trace the lives of characters whose paths cross and re-cross each others, some times in and through love, at other times through tragedy. And through them the author brings to bear a womans perspective on the societal mores in which sexual abuse, homophobia and AIDS, among others, flourish and spread. The social content and views are never proclaimed as a loud agenda; instead, it forms a natural backdrop to the lives of the characters, something that may raise a wry comment or thought in one character, while eliciting a mere shrug from another. Molefhes voice is, to some extent, a world-weary voice, weary of all she has seen of societys failures, but never without the gentleness often absent and much needed in broken societies, and never without the hope and redemption that can be found in love and the imagination. Rustum Kozain

Nino Ricci

Dark, relentless, and unflinching. Danila Botha's is a bold new voice. Julia Tausch
2011 COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES 144 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-41-8 2011 COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES 128 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-03-6

Molefhe shines her thoughtful light on these and other issues by using a central protagonist who lives through different scenarios. In this way she explores all possible facets of one characters life and makes her go on a different journey in each story. All the stories are compelling in their own way and the collection is paradoxically, a gently disturbing read. Janet van Eeden, Litnet

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2010
Joanne Hichens Lauri Kubuitsile

FICTION
Kubuitsile's story 'In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata' which appears in The Bed Book was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize.
Sponsored by the

FICTION

2010
Arja Salafranca

Meg Vandermerwe

The Bed Book of Short Stories

THIS PLACE I CALL HOME

Meg Vandermerwe was born in South Africa in 1978. She read English at Oxford University and is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She teaches at UWC and lives in Cape Town.

The Thin Line

Arja Salafranca is an award-winning, widely published writer of prose and poetry. She is the Arts and Lifestyle editor of The Sunday Independent. She lives in Johannesburg.

Compiled by Lauri Kubuitsile; edited by Joanne Hichens

A collection of short stories by new and established Southern African women writers on the theme of Bed.
Megan Ross Joanne Hichens Pamela Newham Helen Walne Karabo Moleke Sylvia Schlettwein Marina Chichava Romaine Hil Sarah Lotz Joanne Fedler Rita Britz Margot Saffer Isabella Morris Jayne Bauling Liesl Jobson Rose Richards Ellen Banda-Aaku Ginny Swart

Nia Magoulianiti-McGregor Melissa Gardiner Anne Woodborne

Arja Salafranca

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma Erika Coetzee Bronwyn McLennan

Luso Katali Mnthali Gothataone Moeng

Claudie Muchindi Lauri Kubuitsile

Rosemund Handler

Tinashe Chidyausiku

Lauri Kubuitsile is a full time writer who lives in Botswana. She has published childrens and youth books, as well as many short stories. She has won prizes for her adult short fiction and her youth books.
2010 COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES ISBN 978-1-920397-31-9 312 pp

Joanne Hichens is a crime fiction writer, editor and journalist. Her books have been published locally and abroad. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UCT.

These brave imaginings take us into the heart-places of South Africans. Through Vandermerwes fine writing we are enabled to talk about home, come home and perhaps feel at home with(in) one another. Antjie Krog
2010 148 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-02-9

In this thought-provoking collection we are drawn into the lives of others; ten diverse perspectives of what home has meant to South Africans during our countrys challenging history. From an old widower who feels that his world is unravelling in the new South Africa, to an immigrant who has fled persecution in 1930s Europe and now finds himself on a barren sheep farm in the Karoo, to a Polokwane teacher confronted with the moral dilemma of xenophobia, This Place I Call Home leaves the reader deeply aware of local realities.

The stories in The Thin Line hook the reader from the first one, and reel you in on that thin line. You will be haunted by the carefully drawn characters: by Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, by Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, and poor skinny Mark, as he sees his love teeter away from him. Salafranca is an accomplished, award-winning writer, this long-awaited collection is a box of jewels.
For me the biggest bonus was that there is a strong consciousness of the structure of the short story and an implicit reaction to the tradition of the short story.Die

Burger

2010

220 pp

ISBN 978-1-920397-08-1

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2012
Rosemary Smith's life as a Black Sash activist in the Eastern Cape began when she moved from England with her South African husband in the 1960s. They lived in Grahamstown and raised four children. She participated in events spanning three decades, her political involvement tied her to the country.

NON-FICTION
Dawn Garisch is a doctor who writes, a poet who walks, a researcher who dances. She lives in Cape Town near the mountain and the sea and has two grown sons. Her last novel, Trespass, was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize in Africa.

NON_FICTION

2012

SWIMMING WITH COBRAS

Rosemary Smith
Rosemary Smith could never have imagined the trajectory her life would take the day she met her husband. She would find herself in Grahamstown, at a crucial point in South Africas struggle. Joining the Black Sash, the white, women-led anti-apartheid organisation, of which she would one day become a national vice president, gave her the opportunity to engage with a country in, often violent, transition. Swimming with Cobras is a memoir about a journey to find a foothold in a foreign land grappling with its own identity, offering rare and important insight into a corner of South Africas past.
In providing a vivid, and highly personalised account of the activities of a few extraordinary, white, middle class women in the small towns of apartheid South Africa, this book provides a new understanding of the anti-apartheid struggle.

ELOQUENT BODY

Dawn Garisch
As both a medical doctor and a writer, Dawn Garisch has lived a split life for many years. Finally, Eloquent Body allows the two streams of her life to converge. Through exploring both the science and poetry of the body, she investigates how we can determine what to trust. She suggests ways of developing a partnership with oneself, which includes not abusing the very ground we live off and stand on. In an engaging manner, Eloquent Body offers a circumspect and quiet wisdom in response to the instinctual need to find out who we are and why we are.
A richly eclectic, deeply insightful text that draws art and science, poetry and medicine, writing and healing into fertile conversation. Ivan Vladislavic Eloquent Body explores the juxtaposition of healing and creativity both from a personal as well as a medical point of view in an open and honest way. This book is required reading for my medical colleagues and for all patients in search of healing. Anne Pargiter, (General Practitioner)
2012 MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920397-39-5 284 pp

Jacklyn Cock (Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand)

2011 MEMOIR ISBN 978-1-920397-37-1 186 pp

. a biography of socialisation and struggle on South Africas ever-troubled Eastern Cape Frontierwritten with both candour and courage the finest modern book written about GrahamstownPeter Vale Professor of Humanities, University of Johannesburg

Alive to the reality of death, Garisch dances into the split, as both doctor and patient, writer and reader, parent and child. Pregs Govender

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2010

NON-FICTION

2009
Hester van der Walt

2012

NON_FICTION

2009
Malika Ndlovu

Jane Katjavivi

UNDISCIPLINED HEART
Namibian edition by Tigereye Publishing

HESTER SE BROOD

Phumzile Simelane

Sponsored by the LW Hiemstra Trust

Na n loopbaan in verpleegkunde en gesondheidsnavorsing vestig Hester van der Walt haar in McGregor waar sy deesdae brood bak vir die plaaslike mark. Sy skryf graag posie en kortverhale. Hester se Brood het in 2009 verskyn.

Jabulani means Rejoice: A dictionary of South African names

Born in Mpumalanga, Phumzile Simelane-Kalumba, graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1998 with a BCom degree. She lived in the North East of England with her family for 7 years. Whilst there, she developed interest in South African Bantu names. She is currently pursuing her Masters Degree in the Department of Xhosa, University of Western Cape with special interest in onomastics, which is part of African folklore.

INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE
Durban born, Malika Ndlovu is a poet, performer, and playwright whose works have been performed both locally and internationally. She is a founder-member of the women writers collective, WEAVE and is currently curator of the Africa Centres poetry project, Badilisha!

When Jane Katjavivi becomes involved in London in support of change in Southern Africa, she meets and marries a Namibian activist in exile. Moving with him to Namibia at the time of Independence in 1990, she faces a new life in a starkly beautiful country. Her husband is made Ambassador to the Benelux countries and the European Union, and later Berlin, causing Jane to build a new identity as the wife of an ambassador, and come to terms with her own ill-health without her friends around her to support her. Set against the backdrop of the historical, political and social development of newly independent Namibia, Undisciplined Heart tells the story of Janes love for her family, friends and her adopted country.
2010 320 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-04-3

Hester se Brood (Hester's Bread) is an honest and delicious down to earth book that tells of the writer, Hester van der Walt's, passion for baking bread. Set in McGregor in the Klein Karoo - where she bakes bread in a woodfired oven - Hester se Brood reflects the writer's intuitive feeling for the connections between the soul and food, particularly food that is prepared with care, according to traditional principals and methods. A fine sense of humour, helpful hints and mouth-watering recipes make this book as irresistible as the smell of bread fresh from the oven.

This book breaks the silence around stillbirth, often seen as a non-event, something women are expected to get over as soon as possible. Invisible Earthquake is placed in the wider South African context by Sue Fawcus, who writes tenderly and expertly about stillbirth from the point of view of an obstetrician, and by Zubeida Bassadien and Muriel Johnstone, social workers who accompany women going through this shattering experience.
Malika has created a piece of work that gives grief a voice. I know this will bring solace to all those who read it, anyone who has lost any loved one will see themselves in her words. Joy McPherson, Founder Midwives Inc.

English edition to be released in 2012

2009

192 pp

ISBN 978-0-9802729-8-7

2011

REFERENCE

ISBN 978-1-920397-34-0

2009

88 pp

ISBN 978-0-9802729-3-2

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2011
Karen Lazar is an English educator at the Wits School of Education. Her MA and Phd, both from Wits, are in South African gender studies. This is Karens first volume of (first person) creative non-fiction. Karen had a stroke in 2001, from which she has partially recovered.

NON-FICTION
Alleyn Diesel taught Religious Studies at UKZN during the 90s, specialising in Hinduism in KZN. In 2007 Wits University Press published her anthology Shakti: Stories of Indian Women in South Africa. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in Religious Studies.

NON_FICTION

2011
Co-published with Ma Thoko's Books

Hemispheres
Karen Lazar
Home is as old as ones skin but as elusive as an object seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It is this sense of a view, skewed, intangible, which echoes throughout Karen Lazars Hemispheres. Waking in hospital after a post-operative stroke, she finds one side of her body paralysed and her world knocked out of kilter. Spatial, perceptual and subjective changes force her to view her new life in facets. The fragmented view is made apparent by means of a triptych of clusters that chart Karen's experience from Metamorphosis, through Rehabilitation and Adaptation.
A filigree of finely-crafted pieces, Hemispheres narrates the journey of recomposing life, joy and love from a body made alien through stroke. Wry, ironic, comic, joyous, desolate, celebratory, surreal, the mosaic of text reconfigures love from loss; each subtle fragment a tessera against time. Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr, African

SAPPHOS DAUGHTERS OUT IN AFRICA

Edited by Alleyn Diesel

"The stories in Reclaiming the L-Word: Sapphos Daughters Out in Africa eloquently deal with the depth and complexity of lesbian experiences and serve to contradict stereotyping. The writers come from all walks of life, race groups and religious persuasions. The book includes a photo essay by well-known artist and activist, Zanele Muholi, and her article of lesbian rape in South Africa, originally published by Agenda.
This brave and moving collection of stories by South African lesbian women from different backgrounds reminds us, again, that rights are never finally won in legislatures or in court rooms. They are won by people exercising them. The authors of the stories and poems in this book have done just that. They have stood up to celebrate the dignity of lesbian women in South Africa. Each contribution is different. And each intensely personal. And each one reminds us of the urgent need for us to stop hate crime and to create a safe society for all LGBT South Africans. Kate O'Regan, former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
2011 BIOGRAPHY 224 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-28-9

Literature, Wits

A book that pulses with quiet courage and celebrates it in others. Joanne Fedler
2011 CONTEMPORARY MEMOIR 88 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-24-1

Lazars collection gives hope and illumination about how to cope with the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. The reader is left with an enormous respect for a Lazars literary skill and her inordinate courage. Litnet

Moving lesbianism away from spectacle and the exotic, the collection emerges from the wellsprings of lived experience. It tells flesh and blood stories stories of the values, loves, struggles and challenges of living in a society that continues to perpetuate many myths, mythologies and misconceptions about lesbians.

Dr Devarakshanam (Betty) Govinden

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2012
Karin Schimke is a widely published journalist and columnist, and the Cape Times books editor. Her poetry has also been widely published in literary magazines. Bare & Breaking is her first collection of poems.

POETRY

2011

POETRY

2011
WOMANJenna Mervis UNFOLDING
Jenna Mervis is a poet and freelance writer living in Cape Town. Her work has been featured in several South African journals including Carapace, Green Dragon, New Contrast, New Coin and the 2009 PEN Studzinski Literary Award anthology New Writing From Africa. Born and schooled in Durban, Jenna studied Journalism at Rhodes University and obtained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town.

BARE & B R E A K I N G
Karin Schimke
"The stories in Reclaiming the L-Word: Sapphos Daughters Out in Africa eloquently deal with the depth and complexity of lesbian experiences and serve to contradict stereotyping. The writers come from all walks of life, race groups and religious persuasions. The book includes a photo essay by well-known artist and activist, Zanele Muholi, and her article of lesbian rape in South Africa, originally published by Agenda.
Bare & Breaking is one of the most gripping debuts I've read in recent years. Masterful in its technique and heart-rending in its emotional range, this memorable collection tells the story of sexual passion, its devastating aftermath and the slow road home. Finuala Dowling (award winning poet and novelist) I celebrate Karin Schimkes bold exposure of wanting, her naked desire. These poems know the exquisite agony of uninhibited loving, and the addictive pain of losing that love. Her warts-n-all poems reveal a courageous vulnerability. Schimkes poetry whispers, hollers, moans, bends and extends unexpectedly and beyond expectation. Malika Ndlovu (author of Invisible Earthquake and well known

BARE & BRAKING

Margaret Clough

AT LEAST THE DUCK SURVIVED

Margaret Clough grew up in Wellington. After studying at UCT, she worked as a Science teacher, soil chemist and food technologist. She has been published in Litnet, South Africa Writing and Carapace.

Funny, true, pellucid At Least the Duck Survived offers a series of lyrical observations about old age, retirement and approaching death; about Tai Chi classes, dogs, lesbian aunts, grandchildren, bicycles and symphony concerts. In its unassuming charm, perfect understatement, succinctness, attentiveness, generosity and wry humour, Margaret Cloughs poetry proves Virginia Woolfs dictum that Every secret of a writers soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. Irresistible reading. Finuala Dowling

There are degrees of loss. Mostly the loss of oneself in another: myself in you. I catch myself grasping for the next skin. From Shedding Skin

2012 POETRY 84 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-97-5

performer)

These are poems of unfolding. A brain in limbo; a mothers warnings, unheeded; the diving and swimming in life; fiancs who evolve into husbands; a child not yet conceived; poems birthed so that the reader follows the evolution of a word into something tangible, erect, alive.
2011 76 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-33-3

2011

48 pp

ISBN 978-1-920397-85-2

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2007

POETRY

2011
Dawn Garisch
Winner of the 2011 EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Prize

2010

POETRY

2010
THE EVERYDAY WIFE Winner of
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

Megan Hall

Beverly Rycroft
Runner up of the 2011 EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Prize

fourth child

Difficult Gifts

missing
Beverly Rycroft is a graduate of UCT and Wits. She worked as a teacher before turning full time to writing and journalism. Her poems have been published in local literary magazines such as Carapace, New Coin and scrutiny2. Missing is her first collection of poems.

the 2011 SALA Poetry Prize

Megan Hall is a graduate of UCT. Her writings have been widely published in South African literary magazines. She works in the publishing industry.

Dawn Garisch is a doctor who writes, a poet who walks, a researcher who dances. She lives in Cape Town near the mountain and the sea and has two grown sons. Her last novel, Trespass, was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize in Africa.

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a multi-awardwinning writer, performer and editor. She lives in Johannesburg with an assortment of animals and her son.

The poems in Megan Hall's debut collection combine a dark humour and terrible grief with a lightness and restrained sensuality. Her language has the qualities of dance: uninhibited and polished, accomplished and vivid. Fourth Child shows a poet courageously facing deep feelings while being committed to accurate writing, making beautiful and living things out of the fabric of loss, grief, and emptiness.
The tone of Fourth Child is cautious, carefully muted, but freighted with much emotion. A concealed sensitivity is unpeeled, poem by poem, until the reader is left with a knowledge not held before. Fiona Zerbst in The Sunday

Most of the poems in this collection had earlier lives in New Coin, New Contrast, Scrutiny2, Carapace, Fidelities, Green Dragon and Ons Klytlie.
There is a balance of emotion and craft in Garischs poetry, a seamless welding of raw experience and self-observation, of music and thought. She writes the most personal spaces, always lit by her wry, focused understanding. Ken Barris Garishs poems reveal a warm, keen eye for the intricacies, delicacies and difficulties of language and love. Tania van The motif of the body is central to Garischs work; it is a place of sustenance, and offers the possibility of transcending grief. Alan Finlay
2011 56 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-32-6

From the first poem, I was drawn in and found myself devouring these poems hungrily. Rycroft takes the intimate nature of her life and shapes the experience into deeplycrafted works. Her poetry is accessible, vital and necessary: a fine debut. The Star This astonishingly moving debut collection reads compellingly as one complete story. Missing covers the archetypal journey from sickness and near-death transformation and hope. Rycroft wears her exquisite poetic technique lightly - though rich in deftly-crafted images, the poems are profoundly inviting, readable, memorable. I could not put it down. Finuala Dowling The poet works through the horror of the initial diagnosis to a mute acceptance of the brutal illness which threatens everything she treasures
2010 80 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-06-7

The Everyday Wife is Phillippa Yaa de Villiers her second volume of poetry, she unravels the security blanket of workaday routines, exposing the soul of the quotidian.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers illuminates relationships of many kinds and intensities between lovers, children and parents, the politics of emotion shared and remembered and confronted, sustained across the distance of place or memory. Margaret Busby This poet takes the blood and guts of her experiences, such as her childhood rape; her black self rejected by her white adoptive family; her anger at prejudice encountered all experiences are wrenched from the poets heart and shaped into meaning through explosive words. Litnet
2010 92 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-05-0

Schalkwyk

Independent
2007

56 pp

ISBN 978-0-9802729-0-1

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POETRY

2011
Co-published with Pindrop Press (UK)

2010

POETRY

2010
Ingrid Andersen

Sarah Frost

Michelle McGrane

Kerry Hammerton

Conduit
Sarah Frost is a single mother to a six year old boy. She works as an editor for Juta Legalbrief, Durban. She has completed an MA in English Literature, and also a module on Creative Writing, UKZN. She has been published in various SA journals, and also some in the US.

The Suitable Girl

Born in Zimbabwe in 1974, Michelle McGrane spent her childhood in Malawi and moved to South Africa with her family when she was fourteen. She lives in Johannesburg and is the author of two previous collections.

THE ARE THE LIES I TOLD YOU

Kerry Hammerton is a poet, writer and alternative health practitioner. Her poetry has been published in Carapace, New Contrast and New Coin, online at Litnet and Incwadi. She has also been a contributor to The Empty Tin Readings (May 2010) and The Poetry Project.

PIECE WORK
Ingrid Andersens poetry has been widely published in local literary magazines. Her first collection of poems, Excision, was published in 2005. She is the founding editor of Incwadi, a South African online journal of poetry and photography.

Conduit is a book of pared-down poems, graphically tracking a young woman's journey from the lonely spaces of childhood to the creative, powerful realm of womanhood. Restrained and earnest, these poems grapple with the experiences of being a daughter, mother and lover.
These are poems of drowning and coming up again. Of surviving with lungs that breathe water and sunlight. These are poems of longing and loss. Of searching for a foothold in a world where all slides and changes. Sarah Frost is a clear, strong, exciting new voice in South African poetry. Read her. Kobus Moolman Frost writes with a bright perspicacity threaded through growing awareness of the universal truths hidden in the smallest details of life. Janet van Eeden, Litnet
2011 64 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-27-2

Every poem in The Suitable Girl grabs the reader immediately and then proceeds to take her, by a surprising route, to its strange conclusion, taking in much wit, irony, lyricism and sensual detail on the way. These are trips well worth the taking. Joanne Limburg Michelle McGranes The Suitable Girl shows a sophisticated range of reference together with a powerful and moving emotional address. There is great technical range here which includes prose poems alongside sinewy lyrics; elegy jostles with imaginative sci-fi, humour with horror in language which is often as gorgeous as it is precise.

Hammertons poetry tells stories we never tire of living and reliving especially when told new. Her light, sometimes witty, understated control of words, make this telling deliciously new. The Cape Times Hammerton is an anatomist of romantic love, from the rumpled hotel sheets of lust to the shared tattoos of intimacy. With its roller-coaster ride of erotica, sensuality, heartbreak and laugh out loud hilarity, These are the lies I told you is a debut volume destined to break sales records. The Marian Keyes of poetry has arrived. Finuala Dowling Hammertons poetry ranges over the themes of relationships, of that often difficult thorn-strewn path of love gained, and then love lost. But its her amusing, wry funny voice that is such a delightful surprise. Her poetry is amusing, a little droll and, laugh-out-loud funny. Arja Salafranca
2010 76 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-22-7

Andersens poems fuse the best of Imagism with a heartfelt compassion; with a few well-chosen words, she can turn the rawness and imprecision of emotion into poems that reach simultaneously for clarity and for the readers heart. She is generous, careful, and passionate. Fiona Zerbst Ingrid Andersen writes poems for an age of loneliness. With words of powerful simplicity, this book cuts open the heart and mind of the reader, stitches and sometimes mends. Darting lightly in and out of lifes small and lonely spaces and places, her quiet truths offer respite from the worlds noise. Tania van Schalkwyk Meditations on love, loss, family and faith, the poems in Ingrid Andersens second collection gleam with humanity and insight. Each poem in Piece Work is precisely crafted and builds a mosaic of an attentive life. Michelle McGrane
2010 72 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-07-4

Ian Duhig

2011

50 pp

ISBN 978-1-920397-26-5

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POETRY

2009
Funded by the Cape 300 Foundation

2009

POETRY

2009
Fiona Zerbst

Melissa Butler

Sindiwe Magona

Helen Moffett

removing
Melissa Butler lives in Cape Town and Pittsburgh, PA. She has a Masters degree in Curriculum Theory from Penn State University and a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. removing is her first book of poetry.

PLEASE, TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS

Sindiwe Magona is a multi-award winning author of plays, essays, novels, memoirs, educational books for children and poetry. Please, Take Photographs is her first collection of poetry.

STRANGE FRUIT
Helen Moffett is a freelance editor, author and academic. She has lectured as far afield as Trinidad and Alaska, but calls Cape Town home. Strange Fruit is her first collection of her own poems.

Oleander
Fiona Zerbst was born in Cape Town in 1969. She has travelled widely and currently works as a freelance journalist and lives in Rustenburg. Oleander is her fourth volume of poetry.

In these poems Melissa Butler has the unique ability to take almost anything that happens to catch her eye or to figure in her minds eyethese can range from a bowl to a hadeda, from the concept of edges to the cusp of a silence and make it speak volumes not only about itself, but about us in our human lives. Such are her poetic gifts; and such is the quality of this remarkable debut. Stephen Watson The experience of reading the poems in removing is, wonderfully, one of a late-night conversation with a warm, imaginative, thoughtful, observant and compassionate friend. In pellucid language and deeply satisfying images of the real, Melissa Butler manages to talk about the great questions of humanity as lightly and easily as if she were tossing out a picnic blanket. Finuala Dowling
2010 48 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-19-7

From the languid innocence of the poems about her village, to her shattering images of Africa at war, Magona leads you headlong into her fireside circle where archetypes flicker like shadows on a face that has seen, and been. This collection is defiant and tender, horrific and homely, at once irreverent, outspoken and beautiful.
Now, at the peak of her form, Sindiwe Magona gives us poetry the most difficult art form of all to get right, but like an arrow to the heart when they succeed. Jane Raphaely Sindiwe Magonas debut collection, Please, Take Photographs, stands out as a remarkable testimonial of a journey travelled through time and possibilities. Karina

Strange Fruit is a courageous debut with a remarkable range in theme and tone, from the nostalgic to the comedic and bawdy, from angry, melancholic to steadfast and comforting.
In this reflective collection Helen manages to capture images of loss, ageing and infertility that are at once funny, heartbreaking and thought-provoking. A love of nature shines through on every page and our thoughts are allowed to transcend the urban spaces we occupy. The poems are honest, forthright and powerful. Join Helen on this expedition of the senses. The Book Lounge, Cape Town Your voice sparkles with humour and passion and is blessed with intelligence, incredible clarity and verve.

Oleander explores lifes complexities, both beautiful and poisonous love, death, art, the aftermath of war and genocide, travel, religion, revelation. More wideranging than Zerbsts previous volumes, Oleander charts experiences through which the self may be transformed.
In Oleander, Fiona Zerbsts lyrical voice reveals itself not for the first time, she has long been evident as an interpreter of her private and public worlds but yet again strongly, freshly. Her continual reinvention of the self and selfconsciousness about the frame and objects of the invention is perhaps more fully present than in any other young contemporary poet in South Africa. Peter Wilhelm
2009 56 pp ISBN 978-0-9802729-7-0

Magdalena Szczurek , Sunday Independent

80 pp

Yaba Badoe, writer and documentary film-maker, UK

ISBN 978-0-9802729-5-6 2009 56 pp

2009

ISBN 978-0-9802729-6-3

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POETRY
Funded by the Cape 300 Foundation

2008
Azila Talit Reisenberger

Joan Metelerkamp

BURNT Offering
Joan Metelerkamp is the author of seven books of poems: Towing the Line (1992), Stone No More (1995), Into the day breaking (2000), Floating Islands (2001), Requiem (2003), Carrying the Fire (2005), and Burnt Offering (2009).

Life in Translation
Azila Talit Reisenberger is an award winning author who has had poetry and short stories published internationally and in SA. She is a senior lecturer in Hebrew & Jewish Studies at UCT.

Burnt Offering is Joan Metelerkamps seventh collection of poems. Like all of Metelerkamps work, these generous poems draw on the details of family and rural life, dreams, landscapes and journeys and weave together, with her distinctive energy and passion.
Burnt Offering is compelling reading, it sweeps one away like a riptide does. Moira Richards, poet and reviewer I loved Joans collection which I found at once immediately readable, dazzling, fragile, and formidable. Beautiful journeys into the need to love, to speak, to understand and simultaneously to travel beyond the boundaries that constrain language. Stacy Hardy, poet and journalist
2009 96 pp ISBN 978-0-9802729-4-9

Azila Talit Reisenberger is a Bible scholar, a rabbi, a mother, a wife, and a poet. In all these selves she grapples with translating her life from Hebrew to English and back again. Life in Translation is full of wry humour, longing, bitterness, sweetness, playfulness, and subversions of traditional meanings and texts a delightful book that charms and surprises anew with each reading.
Not to be heard. Not to be understood. Azila Reisenbergers poetry makes us overwhelmingly aware how often we have to translate ourselves in order to matter. Antjie Krog

Modjaji Books and Hands-On titles are available for purchase as printed books and e-books from online booksellers Amazon.com, Kalahari.net; Loot.co.za, LittleWhiteBakkie.co.za and others.

follow us on

2008

64 pp

ISBN 978-0-9802729-1-8

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HANDS-ON BOOkS PO Box 385 Athlone, 7760 Cape Town, South Africa cell tel fax modjaji.books@gmail.com +27 (0) 72 774 3546 +27 (0) 21 696 5503 +27 (0) 86 517 9066
Colleen Higgs launched Modjaji Books, the first publishing house for southern African women writers, in 2007. Her first collection of poetry, Halfborn Woman, was published in 2004. She lives in Cape Town with her daughter.

2012
LOOKING for Trouble

h a nds- on books is an imprint of Modjaji Books.

Through Hands-On Books we publish work that we think deserves publication, but that does not fit into the strict criteria of what a Modjaji Book is. Hands-On Books is a bespoke publishing concept where there is collaboration between the publisher and the author, and where the author can be involved in the process.

Colleen Higgs
A collection of short stories set in Yeoville from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The stories capture with a dark humour the lives of young people trying to make a go of things, given the constraints of the country and the volatile period. Most of the stories have been published in literary magazines or in collections of stories including a collection published in Uganda. A slightly earlier version of the title story was published in a collection of stories by South African women edited by Maggie Davey, Dinaane, Telegraph Books, London.
These wry, subtle stories are deceptively simple, completely compelling. Brave, evocative writing that takes you back to the intense milieu of 80s Yeoville, and to all the bittersweet sexual questing of youth. Henrietta Rose-Innes (Author of Sharks These stories awakened in me a sense of nostalgia, not only for Yeoville in the early nineties, but for being young, love's fool and sexually reckless. At some point, experience forces us to lose our illusions and come of age, damaged by love but wiser. This spot-on collection captures that arc of life and, as I turned the last page, I felt we had lived well, if imperfectly. Rachel Zadok (Author of Gem Squash

blog http://modjaji.bookslive.co.za

South African Distributor

Blue Weaver Specialist Publishers Representatives PO Box 30370, Tokai, South Africa, 7966 Tel: +27 (021) 701 4477 Fax Local: 0865242139 Fax International: 0927865242139 Email: marketing@blueweaver.co.za www.oneworldbooks.com www.yourbooks.co.za

Egg, Homing, Nineveh, and Caine Prize Winner)

African Books Collective distributes Hands-On Books internationally

eBooks available from www.littlewhitebakkie.com

PO Box 721 Oxford, OX1 9EN, United Kingdom Tel & Fax: +44 (0) 1869 349110 www.africanbookscollective.com

2012 SHORT STORIES ISBN: 978-1-920397-42-5 96 pp

Tokoloshe)

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Kelwyn Sole was born in Johannesburg in 1951 and has lived in Windhoek, London and Kanye. At present he is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Cape Town. Absent Tongues (Hands-On Books, 2012) is his sixth collection of poetry.

HANDS ON

2010

HANDS ON

2011
Colleen Higgs

ABSENT TONGUES ABSENT TONGUES

Kelwyn Sole
Absent Tongues is Kelwyn Soles sixth collection of poetry; a collection that speaks of tenderness, anger, ambivalence and fear. This is territory Kelwyn has long made his own hymnal vignettes that thread the landscape of South Africa with patterns of myth and people, with pasts, presents, and, at times, with futures. We come away from these poems with something akin to nostalgia, something like a yearning to belong in the most fundamental sense to be water, air, bone, sky. Kelwyn Sole writes with grace, acuity and with thoughtful philosophical purpose, affirming his position in the forefront of contemporary South African poetry.
Kelwyn Sole is South Africas foremost poet writing in English and this, his sixth volume, maintains and reaffirms an oeuvre that does not shy from the difficult complexities of our lives. In lyrics and elegies, love is made strange and new, forceful yet fragile. And his political poems refute any notion that political art can never be art. His insights draw us into the heartlessness of our new political masters (extending a prescient critique of national politics that started in his first book already), the confused brutality behind the murder of poor immigrants, and of a hovering sadness at what might have been/ had we more courage/ had we searched/ further than our skins our pockets. His voice is our national conscience. Rustum Kozain

Edited by Finuala Dowling

Difficult to Explain
Finuala Dowling is a poet, novelist and creative writing teacher. Her first collection, I flying, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the second, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe, was joint winner of the Sanlam Prize for poetry, and her third, Notes from the dementia ward, won the Olive Schreiner Prize.

LAVA LAMP POEMS

Colleen Higgs launched Modjaji Books, the first publishing house for southern African women writers, in 2007. Her first collection of poetry, Halfborn Woman, was published in 2004. She lives in Cape Town with her daughter.

Difficult to Explain is more than just an anthology of highly accessible, striking, funny, quirky, tender and moving poems. It is also a much-needed companion for poets and teachers, offering a series of inspirational exercises as well as memorable reflections on the art of teaching creative writing. An essential book for readers, writers and teachers of poetry. Poet and creative writing teacher Finuala Dowling has put together a collection of the best poems that have emerged from her poetry workshops. The collection includes unpublished and established writers who have attended her classes Beverly Rycroft, Colleen Higgs, Kerry Hammerton, Karin Schimke & Consuelo Roland.
2010 128 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-23-4

The poems are cut with a bald, bare-blade honesty, a mind that makes unusual matches. Colleen fits apartheid paranoia with stubborn partying, then sums up an insane epoch in a sentence, One day the pool opened to all. This last line of my Yeoville is the ending of furtiveness, fear and zealous defiance. The book is an experience of heat, luminescence, and the wackiness of existence. It is the experience of being mesmerised, in confidence, no drugs involved, watching that lava lamp. Tracey Farren The poems in Lava Lamp are compelling: at once conversational and uncanny. Colleen Higgs tells the truth but tells it slant, insisting on the singularity of everything that is familiar domesticity, marriage, motherhood, family. The sequence of poems set in Johannesburg is captivating. Finuala Dowling, poet and creative writing teacher
2011 56 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-25-8

2012 POETRY 80 pp ISBN 978-1-920397-40-1

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HANDS ON

2010
Available to consult for free online at http://www. scribd.com/doc/29265930/ Small-PublishersCatalogue-2010 and to purchase as an e-book for US$1.00. Hard copy out of print.

Robin Winckel-Mellish

Robin Winckel-Mellish lives in the Netherlands and runs a poetry critique group in Amsterdam. Her work has been published in many international literary journals. Her first collection, A Lioness at my Heels, explores the restlessness of living in Europe and being African.

SMALL PUBLISHER's catalogue

hands-on catalogue

The hemispheric pull between Europe and Africa and the restlessness that results from inhabiting both worlds is reflected in A Lioness at my Heels. Robin Winckel-Mellish reconciles the muted tones of her Europe with the riotous colour of Africa. The immediacy, vividness and dustiness of the harsh African sun is carefully offset by the softer quality of the Netherlands. All poems are mediated and considered in the light of a spiritual home.

The Small Publishers Catalogue (Africa) is an initiative that grew out of a meeting held in August 2009 where a number of Small Publishers met for two days in Johannesburg at Museum Africa as part of Khanya Colleges Winter School. The Catalogue is intended to showcase the variety and extent of small publishing in Africa. Because the project was run on a shoe-string budget with no external funding apart from the advertising in the catalogue (for which we are very grateful) it is seen as a first step in developing an African Small Publishers initiative and will hopefully generate an online catalogue and further editions which will include more of the small publishers that surely must exist and thrive in Africa.
2010 96 pp ISBN: 978-1-920397-01-2

2011

44 pp

ISBN 978-1-920397-43-2

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