Browsing by Subject "Creative writing"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Bachelor of magic
    (2014) Kruger, Liam; Coovadia, I; Lotz, S
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    Crossing borders: conscious journeys with my family
    (2015) Kamies, Nadia; Fox, Justin; Coovadia, Imraan
    This work of creative non-fiction encompasses episodes of travel motivated by the author’s desire to expose her children to different cultures and philosophies as an antidote to her own experiences of growing up during apartheid. The journeys are undertaken over a period of 18 years, starting in 1993, just before the birth of a democratic South Africa. Crossing borders refers to both personal and physical expansion, juxtaposing the isolation of apartheid with the freedom to explore that which was foreign. The main theme is that of leaving home to extend one’s view of self in relation to the world, inculcating the possibility of a global community of mutual respect. Minor themes are identity and searching for roots and a sense of belonging; religious tolerance, equality, respect, climate change and children’s rights are some of the issues grappled with in countries as diverse as Cuba, Greenland and Sweden. Although each chapter focuses on a different country, themes of dispossession, discrimination, colonialism and struggle run throughout. The author uses travel as the vehicle to educate her children beyond the borders of a family and a country emerging from a repressive past , teaching them to challenge stereotypes and showing them that people are not that different on the other side o f a man -made divide. Underpinning this family memoir is the joy of travel and discovery of a wealth of culture, history and mythology through the children’s eyes. The children’s development is traced from infancy through adolescence to early adulthood and concludes with the hope that the foundation has been laid to make a constructive contribution to a more empathetic society.
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    The drop out
    (2002) Heiss, Silke; Haresnape, Geoffrey
    The Drop Out is a Bildungsroman in three parts. The reader follows a young European woman's quest for self-discovery. Manja Levsky's journey commences amid the South African white Left during the late 1980s. Manja has two aims: to discover what it means to be a woman; and to create personal independence from the status quo.
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    Letters of stone
    (2015) Robins, Steven Lance; Plummer, Robert; Coovadia, Imraan
    As a young boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Robins was haunted by an old postcard-size photograph of three unknown women on the mantelpiece. Only later did he learn that the women were his father’s mother and sisters, photographed in Berlin in 1937, before they were killed in the Holocaust. Having changed his name from Robinski to Robins, Steven’s father communicated nothing about his European past, and he said nothing about his flight from Nazi Germany or the fate of his family who remained there, until Steven, now a young anthropologist, interviewed him in the year before he died. Steven became obsessed with finding out what happened to the women in the photograph, but the information from his father was scant. The first breakthrough came when he discovered facts about their fates in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the Landesarchiv in Berlin, and the second when he discovered over a hundred letters sent to his father and uncle from the family in Berlin from 1936 to 1943. Steven was finally able to read the words of the women who before had been unnamed faces in a photograph. Letters of Stone tracks Steven’s journey of discovery about the lives and fates of the Robinski family. It is also a book about geographical journeys: to the Karoo town of Williston, where his father’s uncle settled in the late nineteenth century and became mayor; to Berlin, where Steven laid ‘Stumbling Stones’ (Stolpersteine) in commemoration of his family who were victims of the Holocaust; to Auschwitz, where his father’s siblings perished. It also explores the complicity of Steven’s discipline of anthropology through the story of Eugen Fischer, who studied the “Basters” who moved from the Karoo to Rehoboth in German South West Africa, providing the foundation for Nazi racial science; through the ways in which a mixture of nationalism and eugenics resulted in Jews being refused entry to South Africa and other countries in the 1930s; and via disturbing discoveries concerning the discipline of Volkekunde (Ethnology) at Steven’s own university Stellenbosch. Most of all, this book is a poignant reconstruction of a family trapped in an increasingly terrifying and deadly Nazi state, and about the immense pressure on Steven’s father in faraway South Africa, which forced him to retreat into silence.
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    The milkman's dead
    (2011) McNally, Paul
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    Stormwatersloot
    (2008) Coetzer, Pieter Willemse Reino
    In hierdie novelle, wat oor 'n tydperk van drie dae afspeel, word drie karakters se lewens verwoes nadat hulle vroeg een oggend 'n misdaad pleeg op pad terug van 'n partytjie. Die verhaal speel af in 'n moderne stad, wat bekend voorkom dog vreemd is; asof dit 'n dekade of twee in die toekoms is, met 'n geskiedenis wat homself effens anders uitgespeel het as wat 'n mens sou kon verwag. Le Roux Basson, oftewel Maanhaar, is 'n bekende sanger wat oenskynlik 'n perfekte lewe het in 'n era waarin celebrity-status slaafs nagejaag of selfs nageboots word. Sy vriend, Henk van der Hoest, is 'n misdaadjoernalis by 'n dagblad in die stad en vind dat die verskil tussen 'n lewe van misdaad en 'n 'gewone' lewe minimaal is. Stacy Plummer, 'n groupie van Maanhaar, werk in 'n kroeg en verkoop dwelms op klein skaal om die huur te betaal. Sy is die enigste karakter wat met waardigheid deur die gebeure van die verhaal gelaat word. Die verhaal speel agteruit af, met sekere feite wat van die leser weerhou word tot aan die einde, wat eintlik die begin van die chronologiese verhaal is. Die idee is dat die leser hom- of haarself moontlike ander hoofstukke (elke hoofstuk is 'n dag) kan verbeel voor en na die hoofstukke in hierdie novelle.
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    What remains
    (2002) Burle, Eduard; Watson, Stephen
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    The white man's numbers
    (2012) Shah, Sunil; Irwin, Ronald
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    Wonderboom
    (2014) Smith, Maria Elizabeth; Van Heerden, Etienne
    Wonderboom (Wondertree) could be considered as a dystopic novel that takes place in a post-apocalyptic era within the South African landscape. It is the time of disillusioned citizens and access to most resources is limited, except for the plutocrats. The result is that the division between the haves and have-nots is more severe than ever before and is particularly evident along the fringes of society. The protagonist, Magriet Vos, is a fifty-year-old violinist whose memory is disintegrating. Due to the fact that she is a regular performer at the ‘court’ of the despotic ruler Albino X, her impending mental incompetence pitches her at a knife’s edge, because when she will no longer be able to master her art, Albino X will have her killed and dispatched to the taxidermist in order to extend his diorama. Further to this, she has virtually no friends or relatives left in the coastal village where she lives, and she is thus compelled to migrate north, back to the Magaliesberg and the last members of her clan. Vos raids her past in a desperate attempt to survive the post-revolutionary wasteland in the hope of arriving ‘home’ safely. The text fluctuates between the territory of memoir and travelogue as the journey progresses and her sense of consciousness starts to dissipate. Aspects of her musical craft, such as rhythm, tone and tempo are synthesised in the structure of the novel. Further to this, careful consideration was given to references to existing texts by particular authors, serving the purpose of either parody or elegy. Vos’ journey commences in Betty’s Bay on the southern coast of South Africa and unfolds through four voices or perspectives: - The main narrator (illuminating the idiosyncratic viewpoint of Magriet Vos) - Magriet’s diary (memoir) - Encyclopedia (endnotes) - Disintegrating photo texts: a series of constructions/collages, which serves as introduction to each chapter and refers to the ‘image sequence’ of the British photographer Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904) and which is here applied as dismantling device to allow text and image to dovetail. The tree serves as central metaphor − both as axis in nature and as archaic source of ‘knowledge of good and evil.’