CONVENTIONALLY, YOU MAY think of the horror genre, and the images that pop into your head will derive from western culture: Of vampires and werewolves and centuries-old gothic houses that creak and grumble under old untold tales. But we’re in Africa, and the yarns that unfurl here, can […]
BOOK REVIEW: BETRAYAL BY JONATHAN ANCER. IT’S EASY TO judge someone proven to be in the wrong, someone unmasked and publicly shamed. It’s easy to tut-tut about someone’s malleability in the face of complicated lures. It’s also easy to voice judgemental opinions through the gauze of history, and […]
A BEAUTIFULLY CRAFTED tale of loyalty and values learned and imbibed, Dalene Matthee’s novel Die Judasbok (The Scapegoat) translates with a true sense of Klein Karoo grit into an Afrikaans-language radio drama you won’t forget in a hurry. It’s an extremely sensitive and intelligent radio-adaptation that will haunt […]
WRITING IS A messy business. It’s a mixture of grammar and correctness, of rhythm and texture, of perspective and controversy. But occasionally it can be so devastatingly lucid that a scene read more than 20 years ago, can still haunt. Irrevocably. Bruisingly. It takes a truly remarkable team […]
It’s odd how the conjured image of a fruit can be such a potent conveyor of horror and sadness. Think of Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993) or Renos Spanoudes’s The Apple Tree (2002). Jan Groenewald’s Die Pruimboom (the plum tree), an Afrikaans play, fits in […]
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