Botsotso
Description
Edited by Ken Edwins and Allan Kolski Horwitz
Introduction by Botsotso founder Allan Kolski Horwitz
Providing incredible insight into the years of the nascent “Rainbow Nation”, this poetry anthology features contemporary, multilingual, and multicultural works from twelve South African poets of the Botsotso collective. Founded in South Africa in 1994, Botsotso is a magazine, publishing house, collective writing group, and poetry performance platform. This adventurous, interdisciplinary arts project is dedicated to showcasing of the vital role of poetry in South Africa’s freedom struggle and post-apartheid socio-political climate—never so apparent than in this evocative collection.
This anthology, which features several international debuts, includes poetry by Donald Parenzee, Makhosazana Xaba, Bongekile Mbanjwa, Vonani Bila, Kobus Moolman, Anet Kemp, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Ike Mboneni Muila, Lisemelo Tlale, Clinton du Plessis, Sumeera Dawood, and Siphiwe ka Ngwenya.
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Persons
KEN EDWARDS was educated at King's College, London, and at Goldsmiths'. He has been involved in small-press publishing since 1973, when he started up the magazine Alembic with two other King's graduates, Robert Gavin Hampson and Peter Barry. During the same period, he set up Share Publications, which published a number of poetry pamphlets. In 1978 he moved to Lower Green Farm, outside Orpington, where he established an artists' commune and began Reality Studios, a magazine that helped introduce the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to a British readership. He was one of four co-editors of The New British Poetry (1988). With the poet Wendy Mulford, he set up the literary press Reality Street in 1993 - she withdrew from the project in 1998, and Edwards continued to run the press on his own.
ALLAN KOLSKI HORWITZ was born and raised in South Africa. In his twenties, he moved between the Middle East, Europe, and North America, before returning to live in Johannesburg in 1986. Since then, he has worked as an organizer and educator in the South African trade union and social housing movements. His short fiction has been published in three collections: Un/common Ground, Out of the Wreckage, and Meditations of a Non-White White. He has received the Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Short Fiction.