A Readers' Community

In our final episode for the season, Lebohang Masango about the choices we make at the intersection of love and money, and Joy Watson tells me about her favourite anti-heroines. The soft life can be a life of luxury, of champagne and overseas travel, or it could mean money being less of a perpetual worry. The book is about women who pursue this and see their dating lives as part of

In this bonus episode, we bring you a live recording of a book club hosted on 1 March 2023 with Alistair Mackay. It took place at the Book Lounge, and we talked about Alistair’s novel, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, a brilliant queer speculative fiction set in Cape Town in the very near future. This season of A Readers’ Community as well as this live event was made possible

Ritual can be a powerful narrative device. On the one hand, it’s likely to bring together a bunch of characters and to bring a simmering plot to the point of boiling over. On the other hand, they are often associated with a significant life event, with a moment of transition, or with magic and divine intervention. One of the sites where rites and rituals have special significance

With the lack of equity, reparation and justice experienced by the majority of South Africans since the end of Apartheid, there is a sense in the present moment of what we might call an ‘apology fatigue’. In ‘Unsettling Apologies’, Melanie Judge and Dee Smythe have put together a collection of critical writings on public apology that explores the promise of and disappointme

In this episode, join Vasti as she tries to find her way back into reading poetry. She speaks to Nondwe Mpuma, whose collection Peach Country was a wonderful invitation back into the form. Nondwe writes about home, in the Eastern Cape, and the landscape matters - its seasons and its patterns, and the daily rituals and habits that are matched to them - time ticks according to that u

The prevalence and fear of gender based violence really cannot be overstated. The statistics and stories and experiences invade our lives, we encounter it in the news, fiction and non-fiction. For every story we read we raise our guard, we feel more afraid. And on the other side of this fear is male violence. Kopano Ratele suggests that one of the causal factors, and one of the sit

In this episode, we talk to Chase Rhys about their recent collection, 'Misfit: Stories vannie anne kant'. A lot of the stories in this collection are about being an outsider, about not quite belonging in any space one enters into, about intersections of identity, about being more than one thing at once – in other words, in hybrid identities, and the in-between spaces. We asked An

We are back with the fourth season of A Readers’ Community. We’re really covering a wide range of books and ideas in this season - like thinking about home through poetry, what we can hope for from public apologies, about the choices we make at the intersection of romantic love and money, about being a misfit, an outsider, and much more. First episode out on 22 February. Thanks

In this, the final episode of the season, we take a trip through some crime writing via Rofhiwa Maneta's, 'A Man, a Fire, a Corpse', a book about his father, the top cop of Soweto - Captain Amos Maneta. Mervyn recommends 'Young Blood' by Sifiso Mzobe, 'Hammerman' by Mike Nicol, 'The Heist Men' by Andrew Brown, 'Unforgiven' by Liz Macgregor, and 'How to be a Revolutionary' by CA Dav

We explore queerness in speculative fiction, featuring Keely Shinners talking about their debut novel, How to Build a Home for the End of the World, and with recommendations from Colin Pegon. Colin and Vasti talk about ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Urusula K Le Guin, ‘Ancillary Justice’ by Ann Leckie, ‘It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way’ by Alistair Mackay, and ‘Kindre