South Africa’s celebrated tourist route, the Midlands Meander, can now boast a literary festival among its offerings.

“It’s been a long time coming,” says founder and programme director of the Midlands Meander Literary Festival, Darryl David. ‘I’ve dreamt of this day for seven years, and now it’s almost upon us.”

David comes with a wealth of experience in this field, being the founder of Book Town Richmond in the Karoo, programme director for its annual literary festival BookBedonnerd, as well as the founder of the Olive Schreiner Festival in Cradock.

There is good reason for Sally-Ann Murray’s debut novel, Small Moving Parts, meeting with the many accolades and short listings that it has (the Sunday Times Literary Award among others).  Written in a graphic, poetic style which weaves effectively and absorbingly throughout, the novel is South African to the core but without focusing on the serious political preoccupations that dog most South African writing. Instead, the broader social issues that dominate life in the 1960s feature incidentally as a context for the focus on the dramatic smallness of personal existence.

The flickering, “moving parts” of intellectual life and experiences of Halley, lead the reader through her development and growing awakening to the rather ugly realities of her world. Halley is simultaneously a vital, ordinary girl and a most extraordinary young mind.  Because she finds pleasure in the predictable and the complete, she relishes the orderliness of seeing things with sometimes monstrous clarity, like the enlarged images of fleas that she finds in her books and the clinical details that she examines in her borrowed biology text. Intent on becoming an intellectual, she obsesses over words and broods over the incomplete set of encyclopaedias her mother, Nora, has acquired to enhance her children’s education, but cannot afford to carry on buying. Halley strives for more, her mind “brimming” as she seeks to comprehend that which cannot be understood by one so young. She wonders, for instance, why her mother has decided not to order the rest of the set – did Nora see something in the first parts that offended her?  These glimpses into Halley’s mind are captured by Murray in detailed and humorous vignettes.

compiled and edited  by Mthobisi Mqadi.

The Creative INK Anthology (Izimbongi Zesimanje) book is another living tale among the townships of Inanda, Ntuzuma and Kwa-Mashu. Compiled by the well known Durban based poet and activist, Mthobisi Mqadi, the book consists of short stories, essays, poems and motivational words written in IsiZulu and English. All the writing in book Creative INK Anthology is written by the youth of INK Area. The Creative INK Writers are following in the footsteps of many respected writers  who were born in the area, like Mandla Langa (The Lost Colours of the Chameleon), Dr JL Dube (Ujeqe, the body servant of King Shaka) Sita Gandhi  (Memoirs of Sita Gandhi) and many other writers who have lived in the INK Area.  All the members of the Creative INK Writers were born in the area and who else better to tell their stories?  In the book, the Creative INK Writers go the extra mile writing about their day-to-day living conditions through empowering, compassionate social stories that the wider community does not know about.