Reading Matters (week 024) 10 June 2025

Poet and author, Antjie Krog, has written an autobiographical novel, as she terms it. Blood’s Inner Rhyme (Penguin) would make me howl with pain and loss if I had emigrated from SA.

For it captures the splendid bleakness of the Free State, the family struggles about inheritance, and the slow disintegration of Krog’s famous writerly mother, Dot Serfontein.  Krog writes about the Anglo-Boer War, about apartheid, about sibling rivalry – indeed her luminous words capture the essence of our lives.

Andrea Nattrass, the publisher of Pan Macmillan South Africa, has an interesting discussion with me on topics that range from self-publishing, the newfound popularity of print books, and authors ranging from Peter Godwin, Ellen Kuzwayo, Tony Park ,Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and Craig Higginson.

So, how hard is it to get a book published for the first time? Not easy, but, it is achievable, says Nattrass, in this the 21^st birthday year of Picador Africa Books. Their website is a mine of fascinating facts for aspirant authors.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall