SILKE HEISS

Monday 09 November at 19:30 SAST

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Silke Heiss is an award-winning South African writer, who has published poems, short stories and a verse novel in various South African journals and anthologies since 1991. She co-authored 8 poetry books in dialogue together with her husband, the late Norman Morrissey. After his death, she documented her journey of grief and healing, published in 'Greater Matter: A Journey of Poems to Death and Beyond' (2019) in association with PoeTree Publications. This year, she launched a volume of quiet nature poems, 'Sweet Nothings (with Notebook)'. She was a digital exhibitor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. The most exciting thing in her life recently was that a seahorse was spotted in the lagoon near where she lives.

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BRIAN WALTER

Monday 02 November at 19:30 SAST

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Brian Walter was born in Port Elizabeth where he again resides after spending 19 years in Alice, teaching at the University of Fort Hare. He has published 6 collections of poetry, the first two, Tracks and Baakens, with the historic Lovedale Press. Mousebirds was published by Seaberg, a short-lived publishing venture, and Poems Packed for Travel, by Poetree. His last two collections were published by Echoing Green Press and Dryad Press: Otherwise and other poems and Allegories of the Everyday, respectively. He writes with the Ecca group of poets, and mentors the Helenvale Poets from Helenvale, Port Elizabeth, who have been writing for 9 years. He has won the 1999 Thomas Pringle Award for poetry published in journals and the 2000 Ingrid Jonker Prize for Tracks, as well as National and Provincial awards.

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JOHN VAN WYNGAARD

Monday 26 October at 19:30 SAST

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"For all that poetry has been a central joy throughout my life, I’ve read infinitely more of it, and taught and talked about more of it, than I’ve actually written, this over several decades teaching literature (mainly poetry) and creative writing at graduate and postgraduate level at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. And so I’ve published, and wanted to publish, infinitely less than most poetry writers I know. This was partly due to the old consequence all teachers know of- a genuine tendency towards self-criticism and self-doubt that knowing what good poetry is will generate in you; and a real unease about my ‘carbon footprint’ when I see poets bursting into expression, on unprecedented scale, all about me! But other internal voices still need expression, and it’s been wonderful, for me, to find in my self and my life the origin, sometimes, of poems that seem to earn their own living space. Wonderful also to find enjoyment in the serious play that all creativity is. I’m especially grateful to the Ecca poets for inviting me on board these several years, giving me room and reason to try to say, to spread some wings, to get something said and done."

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