Tracey Farren (1966 - ) is a full time writer and lives in False Bay with her teenage children, her partner and four large dogs. Farren has a psychology honours degree from the University of Cape Town. Before pursuing her full time writing ambitions, she worked as a freelance journalist for a few years, publishing in the South African newspapers and magazines. Her journalism during this time showed a marked interest in issues like child justice, prison conditions and prostitution.

Farren published several short stories in South African collections before writing her first novel, Whiplash. These include stories in the South African Short Story Review, Urban One, Urban Two, Nobody Ever Said Aids, Women Flashing and Writing the Self. She is currently working on her second novel entitled Snake in the Grass.

Sefi Atta's Lawless & Other Stories may sound like an homage to Edwidge Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory or her short story collection Krik? Krak!, but there is no doubt it was a radical departure from anything anyone had ever previously attempted in Nigerian fiction writing.

Ms. Atta who is the Fall Quarter 2008 Visiting Writer in Residence for the Center for the Writing Arts at the prestigious Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois won the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa for her novel "Everything Good Will Come"

The protagonist of the first chapter titled "Hailstones on Zamfara" is a thirty-three year old melancholy housewife who became pregnant by sleeping with "a man who doesn't exist." Her husband dragged her to the Sharia court where it was expected she would be pronounced guilty and sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.

The woman gave us insight into her fractured early life: like how she was married to her husband at fourteen and suffered left ear damage as a result of excessive beating by an abusive drunkard husband. She also shares the stories of her husband's new bride with us; a girl that was of the same age as her daughter Fatima and who once told her "At least you are old. You should be like a mother to me."

I like the title of Kobus Moolman’s recent collection of poetry, Separating the Seas. The turmoil in the words encouraged me to do this review. For as I grow older and begin to understand myself more, I find contentment in chaos and in storms. I am impatient with light which I find false. The dark principle to me explains everything, including absurdity, absence and loss. I know now that humans are exceedingly weak. Poets must deal with the rising complexities in human language with the understanding that life is in its most demoralizing and absurd stages . And therein lies the meaning in the struggle to which Kobus Moolman refers: a search for man’s elusive sanity.

There’s a perceptive urgency in these finely crafted poems to use language to undo life’s persistent puzzles:

The mist comes in

on the slough of the sea.

The sea appears

out of the mist in scraps.

There is no border

to the wound all around,

and the thinning of the grey

far away into doubt.

(“Confirmation”)

KZN Literary Tourism invites you to our end of year event.  Join us as we celebrate the launch of the Cato Manor Writer's Trail and Stephen Coan's new book of poetry Chant of the Doves.

Regards,