GEOFF RYMAN'S 100 AFRICAN WRITERS OF SFF - PART SIX: CAPE TOWN

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"... nobody interviewed here remains untouched by the difficulties of being a South African writer. "

Geoff Ryman gets stuck into the rocky South African landscape of SFF. The good and the bad and the realities for those trying to find their voice.

Part 6: Cape Town Part


ENDNOTE: EMBODYING THE DIVISION

My first short story (Land of Light) was published in Malawi, the second (Veiled) in Nigeria, and finally the third (Water) in South Africa...
"South African writers can find publication in other African countries, free from their country’s limitations.
Nikhil Singh’s novel Taty Went West was first published by the Kwani Trust in Kenya. Omenana magazine recently published one of Toby Bennett’s stories, and The Ake Festival included a fine story by Stephen Embleton in its 2016 Festival publication."
You find the right publisher for your pieces, rather than trying to be published in your home country. Don't get me wrong, getting that third story published in South Africa felt awesome! But nothing beats someone asking to publish your work - no matter where they are in the world. It wipes all those rejection slips off the table (into the filing cabinet for grounding reality checks later).

Writers Not Interviewed (and Durban part coming soon)

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Published Works

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2015-2024 Fiction: 'Land of Light' : 'Imagine Africa 500' speculative fiction anthology (2015/2016) (Speculative Fiction). 8,000 words. Read more...   (Malawi)/(UK reprint 2017) 'Veiled ':  2016 'Beneath This Skin' Edition of Aké Review (2016) (Fiction). 1,450 words.  Read here...   (Nigeria) 'Water' : 'The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story! Vol.2' anthology (2017) (Fiction). 3,100 words.  Available on Amazon  or Read Online (South Africa) 'Sub Migratio' : the debut edition of Enkare Review (2017) (Speculative Fiction). 3,500 words.  Read here...   (Kenya) 'Inktober' : 2018 edition of 'The Bloody Parchment' (2018) (SF/Horror). 1,250 words.  Available on Amazon .  (South Africa) 'The Girl with Two Bodies' : The Kalahari Review (Nov 2018) (Fantasy). 7,050 words.  Read here...  (South Africa) 'Journal of a DNA Pirate' : Volume 3 of 'AfroSF' (Dec 2018) (SF). 8,150 words.  ...
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Adinkra Font & Book Title Design

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It was a real pleasure to be able to create something unique for a friend and Sauúti Collective colleague – Cheryl Ntumy – for her new novella coming out with Atthis Arts press: a custom display typeface and title design. Design & Typography: Stephen Embleton, Illustration: Akintoba Kalejaye Find Atthis Arts here. A latinised version of the Adinkra alphabet from Ghana (because Cheryl is Ghanaian!), it has some fantastic characteristics and a very modular form which made it a fun, yet simple, design to work on. I first focused on the letters needed for Cheryl's book cover, and then fleshed out the other characters, as well as creating a "light" version. One happy accident for the cover design was incorporating the "working" components of each letter in the design itself. i.e. when I work on fonts, I find the common weights (stroke thicknesses) and common shapes, and move these around to exact positions. And by making them separate bright colours enables m...
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ANNOUNCED: Bloomsbury Academic Acquires Essay Anthology

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  UPDATE: Cover Reveal April 2024 Great to part of this! Thanks, to Eugen Bacon, who initiated this over a year ago: Bloomsbury Academic will be publishing this essay anthology covering a HUGE range of topics and insights within Afro-Centred Futurisms, including my essay “Cosmologies and Languages Building Africanfuturism”. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction is an accessible work of criticism that will appeal to scholarly readers and broader enthusiasts of Afrocentric and speculative literature.  British Fantasy Award winner Eugen Bacon (ed.)'s AFRO-CENTERED FUTURISMS IN OUR SPECULATIVE FICTION, an anthology of original artistic essays infused with creative excerpts from award-winning African writers on the futurisms in their speculative fiction; a new kind of African study in an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, 'becoming', black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmolo...
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