Jana van Niekerk has published seventy poems, two handfuls of short stories and flash, five romance novellas and three picture books (some under different names). Find her work in New Contrast, Stanzas and Aerodrome and in the collections In Other Stories (Karavan Press, 2025), One Life (Tattoo Press, 2024), The Garden of the Beloved (the 2021 McGregor Poetry Festival Anthology) and For the Duration (Botsotso, 2015). She holds a PhD, lives in Cape Town, and has a first novel

We're pleased to invite you to our closing event for 2026, and our first physical get-together in many months! Please join us at Alliance Française to celebrate poetry and the wonderful online connections we've made with each other in 2026. Our featured poets are our valued OTW committee members, juli Jana Roussouw and Harry Owen. Please avail yourselves of the open mic following their readings! When: 18.30 for 19.00 until 21.00, Monday 30 November Where: Alliance Française,

Birdwatcher, award-winning conservationist, award-winning novelist (National Arts & Culture Prize for Outstanding Fiction), award-winning architect, and poet Vernon Head has recently won the Austin Roberts Memorial Medal (Africa's highest honour for bird conservation) and he has been nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in the USA. Time: 19.30, Monday 2 November Zoom Room: https://us05web.zoom.us/j/89955065083?pwd=1sZazkaPVMmeF2reg0JHVH9HrlNefA.1 Meeting ID: 899 5506

Join us for a tribute to Mzi Mahola (1949–2023), with readings from There Was No-one, a recently published selection of his poems, by Robert Berold, Mangaliso Buzani, and Mxolisi Radebe. Written in his direct, memorable style, Mahola's poems range from a childhood rooted in nature and Xhosa tradition, to his long fight against the apartheid state as an underground MK soldier, to portraits of people trying to survive in the urban townships of the Eastern Cape. Besides his four

Dominique Botha grew up on a farm in the Free State and now lives on a farm outside Stellenbosch. She is the author of the novel False River, which won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize, the Eugène Marais Prize and the Jan Rabie-Rapport Prize, and the poetry collection Donkerberg/Bloodwood, winner of the Ingrid Jonker Prize. Her latest publication The Crying Bride and other Hallucinations is a mosaic of lyrical and comical auto-fictional essays that traverse across p

Archie Swanson is an awarded South African poet who has published seven collections of poetry: the stretching of my sky (2018), the shores of years (2019), beyond a distant edge (2021), of clay (2022), at the estuary (2024), winnowings (2025), and seventy (2026). Archie and esteemed South African poet and publisher Douglas Reid Skinner will be in conversation on the process of building a body of work, using winnowings — Archie's recent collection of 250 selected poems — as a

Jacques Coetzee is a poet, musician and freelance translator. Since 2007 he has been the singer and one of the main songwriters in the band Red Earth & Rust, which released its fifth album of original material in 2022. In January 2018 he and Barbara Fairhead launched their joint anthology of poems, The Love Sheet, which was published by Hands On Books, an imprint of Modjaji. His debut solo collection, An Illuminated Darkness (uHlanga Press, 2020) was the winner of the Ingrid

Thando Fuze is a poet, performer, curator and cultural activist from Durban, South Africa, whose work explores identity, sexuality, gender justice and the complexities of contemporary Black womanhood. A compelling voice in spoken-word performance, she founded the SHEfted Minds project in 2016 to amplify the work of female artists, and has worked with schools as a peer educator. She has featured at festivals including the Göteborg Book Fair and Queer Art Festival (Sweden), the

Petros Isaakidis was born in Greece and trained as a physician and epidemiologist, work that has taken him to Kenya, Gaza and the West Bank, Cambodia, India, Thailand, South Africa, and elsewhere. Alongside his scientific work, he holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the University of Cape Town, and his poetry and prose, in English and Greek, have appeared in a variety of magazines. His bilingual poetry collection, volcanoed / ηφαιστειωθείς, was

Join us for the Launch of Blood Skin Bones — the new collection from Phelelani Makhanya. Phelelani Makhanya is a writer and poet from Kwa-Maphumulo, KZN. His work has been published in major South African literary journals including New Contrast, Botsotso, Stanzas, New Coin and the AVBOB Poetry Project. He has three published poetry collections — 'This Time I Shall Not Cry', 'My Father's Blazer', and the recently published 'Blood Skin Bones' — with a fourth, 'The Village Watc