Browsing by Subject "Creative Writing"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 193
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    A Journey through trauma: a memoir about grief, healing, memory, trauma, spiritual quest and social justice
    (2019) Gwala, Dela; Bennett, Jane
    I am finally getting used to being home. Two weeks into 2013, I have the kind of routine reserved for unemployed recent graduates. I wake up and try to convince myself to run. On the days where the tedium of being in Centurion wins out, I lace up, push the gate open and put my earphones in. I take a breath whilst Florence Welch's vibrato nudges me to get going. My feet slowly shuffle up the cul-de sac that winds around the corner and ends at the security gate. The best time to jog midweek in the suburbs is after the school run.
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    A Secretary's Wife
    (2022) Owen, Catherine; Coovadia, Imraan
    A Secretary's Wife is a work of historical fiction that draws from real events and people who emerge from the journals and letters of Lady Anne Barnard while she was in the Cape for the period 1797–1802. Lady Anne Lindsay marries a younger man without title or fortune. When he lands a position as secretary to the governor of the Cape, she is determined to go with him. They make the journey on a crowded ship to Cape Town and, on arrival, find the Cape expensive and turbulent. Narrow-minded people complain incessantly, slavery and hangings are rife, and shortages of wood, flour and other commodities are commonplace. Life improves after they are offered accommodation in the abandoned old Government House at the castle. They set up a home and try to understand the culture, the people around them and each other. Barnard begins to thrive leaving Anne to her own devices. At the same time, she come to terms with being barren within the context of her society. The use of a country cottage called Paradise helps the Barnards reconnect, but when Lady Anne suspects Barnard's infidelity with a slave woman and, due to ill health, the governor leaves the Cape, life can never be the same again. In writing this work, I have attempted to reimagine Lady Anne Barnard's life, in particular the personal aspects to which she may have made fleeting references, otherwise it is entirely fictional.
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    A Soft Landing
    (2021) Mushwana, Wisani; Boswell, Barbara-Anne
    For Andzani, home has always been a trigger for unpleasant memories, it has become the site for anxiety. After completing his Accounting Degree at the University of Cape Town and securing employment after, Andzani minimizes his visits back home to evade those memories home allows to seep through and confront him. He fears what this remembering will do to him, undo in him. Then one morning he receives a phone call from his uncle, Sontaga, to come fetch his mother, Violet, and take her to a mental institution because her mental health is deteriorating. As if given a last chance, on this trip, long-repressed memories flood his head and dull his days in order to force him to pay attention to them, digest them. In Dorothy L. Pennington conceptualisation of memory as a helix, she states that “the past is an indispensable part of the present which participates in it, enlightens it, and gives it meaning.” Taking this assertion as a point of departure, ‘A Soft Landing' is a novel that explores the implications of a past not decisively dealt with. The novel explores how the past gives meaning to present identities and how new identity formations are negotiated within the eye of the past participating in the present.
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    Algeria's way
    (2005) Smith, Alexandra
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    Aloe and honey : tales from town and country
    (1998) Mxakwe, Mzamadoda Theophilus; Coetzee, JM; Galgut D
    The Black South African literary oeuvre has as its dominant background township life. There has been a considerable neglect of village or rural setting. Even the proliferation of writing that has been regarded as depicting genuine African experience has fallen short of remedying this malady. There is a paucity of writings that endeavour to depict rural communities, and even where South African writers attempted to depict rural community, theirs has been an indolent attempt, as evinced by a lack of insight in such writings. One example is Matshoba's Call Me Not A Man. which is merely a glimpse into the rural setting. This shortcoming, coupled with a travesty of the rural setting, suggests a non-existence of the rural community. Whether South African writers, especially, Black writers, eschew rural setting deliberately or not is open to debate. Hence my project has as its paramount aim an endeavour to expose authentic rural realities. This collection, therefore, portrays rural life against the backdrop of city life. This paradoxical juxtapositioning is a deliberate attempt to enable the reader to extricate real-life happenings from both scenarios, and have a sound judgement about his/her observation.
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    An intimate war
    (2007) Donve, Lee
    The first time we divorced we did it on a serviette. I arrived first. Sitting outside on the wooden deck nursing my first gin and tonic I watch you get out of your car and walk towards the restaurant. One hand brushing the chunky curls off your broad forehead. The other hovering protectively around the zip of your jeans trying not to draw attention to itself but needing to make sure that you are securely zipped in.
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    Another man's dick : a satire
    (2007) Christie, Sean
    The billboard that nearly caused John Woods to swerve off the coastal road stood much higher than existing legislation permitted. He knew this because he had recently taken a position as a community reporter on a local rag, and he was starting to get a hang of municipal legalese, whether he liked it or not. A hundred yards on he contemplated its mysterious message, identically phrased in the reverse view, and set against the same blue background that had Woods thinking, for a subliminal moment, that the Billboard was part of the ocean beyond, the white letters nothing more than gently ruffled caps of water. The Wait is Almost Over. He looked around at the green mountainside and the gently waving forest of kelp, which flanked the ocean road. Not an impatient scene, exactly. Not a single soul waiting for a god-damned thing. He read the slogan again, and as its meaning dawned (an understanding that it must mean some development was imminent: that almost over portended the very worst for a perfectly beautiful section of mountainside, untouched for all time) he became aware of an increasing tightness in his chest, as if he were taking on pressurised air. He felt the desire to shout something back at the slogan, something equally presumptuous, equally menacing. He picked up a rock, a nice blade of Cape sandstone, and hurled it. (The missile struck with a clang, and dropped to the ground.) Next he tried to pull the billboard over, but since it was not a supple birch, the thing would not begin to lean, no matter how high he climbed. When Inspector Claude Grey rounded the corner on a routine patrol he intercepted Woods at that point of his destructive endeavours where he had attached a tow-line to the structure's left leg, and was proceeding to push the engine of his car through higher and higher revolutions as white sand spurted out from beneath his balding tyres. On the charge sheet the following information was recorded: Name: Jonathan Woods Occupation: Community Reporter, Environmental Affairs. Offence: Destruction of property Mason Construction PTY (Ltd), to whom the billboard belonged, went ahead with the prosecution. It was not to be the last charge laid against the reporter (then a young man) by that company. The story that follows is, in a sense, an account of this long and bitter feud.
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    Apocalypse now now
    (2011) Human, Charles
    Baxter Zevcenko is your average 16-year-old-boy. If by average you mean a possible serial killer, the kingpin of a porn-peddling schoolyard syndicate and the only thing standing in the way of full-scale gang warfare between the two powerful gangs which control Westridge High School. Which may well be what counts for average these days.
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    The Apocalypse Syndrome
    (2008) Ismail, Mahomed Sayed
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    'The art of forgetting' : a novel in progress
    (2008) Ball, Kathryn E; Fox, Justin
    'The Art of Forgetting' is a novel in progress. It can be classified as a work of psychological fiction which adopts the form of a circular narrative. The story is set in Northern Wisconsin, USA. Part One takes place in a mental institution and examines the psychological landscape of Kai Hawkin, the protagonist, in response to events in her life; the precise nature of these events is not elaborated upon. Part Two traces her recent history and ends where Part One begins, thus giving background as to why Kai has been committed to psychiatric care. The setting for Part Two alternates between a Native American Indian reservation and a holiday town close by.
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    Asylum story
    (2009) Low, Marcus
    asylum story is a short literary novel set in South Africa in the year 2019. The protagonist is infected with a deadly new respiratory disease and being held in a quarantine facility near a fictional town in the Karoo. The novel spans a six-month period during which the protagonist becomes involved in an ultimately failed attempt to escape. The novel is partly inspired by the Department of Health's decision in 2007 to place patients with drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis into quarantine. Many patients died in this enforced captivity. Conditions in some facilities were reportedly very poor and in 2008 there was a high-profile escape from the Jose Pearson quarantine facility. Though the disease in the novel is not drug-resistant tuberculosis, it is something similar, and the response to the fictional disease is comparable in some ways to the real-life medical response to the TB scare. The novel is set in a universe that is similar but different to our own, allowing the exploration of universal themes without the constraint of a rigid representation of current reality.
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    At the end of the journey : poems
    (2002) Xhegwana, Sithembele Isaac; Watson, Stephen; Nyamende, Abner
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    The avocado pear tree
    (1999) Case, Bonita
    For twenty years Elsie September has refused to visit her uncle, Hannie, a state patient at Valkenberg mental hospital. At her grandmother's insistence, she almost goes to see him one day, but she only gets as far as the building and cannot bring herself to go inside. Instead, she meets Shaun and, as a relationship develops, Elsie begins to tell him the stories of her childhood. But Elsie's relationship with Shaun is troubled and unbalanced. Before Elsie reaches the point in her narrative where she will explain why she refuses to see her uncle, she and Shaun part acrimoniously and he disappears. Elsie has, by now, become so caught up in the telling of her story that not even Shaun's disappearance can stop her from going back to the day her world changed beneath the sheltering arms of the avocado pear tree.
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    Bad luck chicken
    (2023) Baker, Naomi; Coovadia, Imraan
    Bad luck chicken
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    Before the bittersweet
    (2013) Gammelin, Cherry Ann; Fox, J; Hambidge Joan
    Before the Bittersweet is an American story about the experiences of five teenagers during one summer in a small town on a lake in New England. The plot offers a realistic representation of what can happen in a Middle American society where ambition is often lacking, boredom is plentiful and the loss of innocence happens all too quickly. This story, foreshadowed by the natural beauty and darkness of its setting, runs about 46 000 words and brings a tone that is somewhat similar to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
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    Bin collection day and other stressful events
    (2023) Tennant, Megan; Coovadia, Imraan
    Elizabeth is six when the ANC wins the first democratic elections in South Africa. While most of the country celebrates freedom, the only difference she notices is the growing intensity of her fears. Fear remains a faithful companion to Elizabeth as she grows up. She fears the rubbish trucks in her childhood, the Valentine's Dance in high school, and the remote possibility of passing out in a gutter somewhere in her first year of university. The short stories in this collection feature a similar (and often contradictory) version of the protagonist, from Elizabeth's childhood in eastern Johannesburg to her early adult years in an uptight Cape Town neighbourhood. Each story deals with a dilemma unique to each life stage and should be read in isolation. But its neighbours in the collection reveal the recurring tensions that influence an identity. In Elizabeth's case, these include the role of her religion, her repressed racism, and the bizarre benefits of gross inequality. All of these contribute to her urge, as a white girl in post-apartheid South Africa, to peer across from her and check if she should be somewhere, or someone, else.
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    The blank space on the map
    (2013) Minster, Jonathan; Coovadia, Imraan
    From the cold shores of Marion Island to the plains of the Great Karoo, this is a story about four South Africans, by birth or circumstance, who are marooned on the outskirts of society and trying to find their way back. Livhu is a scientist who has been sent to a remote research station to study ocean currents. Besides the challenge of adjusting to the frozen island landscape, she also grapples with her feelings for a young seal researcher. When the relationship takes an unwanted turn, Livhu is forced to search deep inside herself and find the strength to survive a lonely year very far from home. Casper is a sub-editor who works for the most trashy tabloid in Johannesburg. He’s on cruise control, plugging away at a job he doesn’t really enjoy, full of regret about previous opportunities he thinks he’s squandered. When a strange assignment comes his way, and a new friend with it, he sees the hazy outline of a map that will lead him away from previous hurt towards a brighter, more ambitious future. Garrick is a ski-boat skipper from Durban. He once captained cargo ships, but when his family fell apart and the rum took over, this was the only job he could get. Now he has a rare opportunity to make good money delivering a catamaran to the Seychelles and rekindle the bond with his estranged son at the same time. On the open ocean, however, tempers fray under skies brimming with thunderclouds, and the threat of pirates is ever present. Jamal walked out of war-torn Somalia as a teenager with his brother. Now his brother has been killed in a xenophobic attack in a Johannesburg township and Jamal is all alone. With no other prospects, he carries on walking, south towards Cape Town, where he has a cousin who might be able to help him. Along the way, desperate and dehydrated, he is taken in by an elderly loner in a small Karoo town who has secrets of his own. Unbeknownst to each other, the lives of these four strangers will touch each other in unexpected ways, suggesting that we are all closer than we’d like to admit, held together by the universal desire for redemption.
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    Blikhoek
    (2009) Botha, Fourie
    This study examines aspects of the creative writing process and some literary statements in Joan Hambidge’s novel Kladboek (2008). The possible guidance for beginner-poets present in the metafictional Kladboek is examined with reference to Fourie Botha’s collection of poetry titled Blikhoek (included), which came about during work done for a Creative Writing Masters degree from the University of Cape Town.
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    Borderline
    (2004) Dicey, William
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    Borderlord Scuttle
    (2021) Cromhout, Luke Jacob; Coovadia, Imraan
    Borderlord Scuttle is set in an alternate version of South Africa's Eastern Cape based on the fictional papers of a thief named JB Niemand and the story follows his first adventure. After the end of a relationship with an artist named Rebekah, JB Niemand's own artistic aspirations dashed. He is uninspired and directionless with no way to sustain himself, let alone pursue a career as a painter. To solve both problems he turns to a life of crime. With his profits he plans to complete a pilgrimage to Alice to see a Walter Battiss artwork that Rebekah claimed would finally make him the artist he dreamed of becoming. However, he is no master criminal. The story begins when JB Niemand finds himself in prison. At Middledrift Corrections JB Niemand develops a dependent and ambiguous relationship with Stix, a career criminal who will end up abandoning JB in the bush shortly after their escape from prison. Stix's betrayal catalyses JB's becoming and he is propelled into a journey that sees him attempting to join a gang of hill bandits who call themselves the Ninevites, drinking in a small town bar in The Settler Flats, and eventually making good on his plans to go to Alice.