The Botsotso literary journal started in 1996 as a monthly 4 page insert in the New Nation, an independent anti-apartheid South African weekly and reached over 80,000 people at a time – largely politisized black workers and youth – with a selection of poems, short stories and short essays that reflected the deep changes taking place in the country at that time. Since the closure of the New Nation in 1999, the journal has evolved into a stand-alone compilation featuring the same mix of genres, and with the addition of photo essays and reviews. The Botsotso editorial policy remains committed to creating a mix of voices which highlight the diverse spectrum of South African identities and languages, particularly those that are dedicated to radical expression and examinations of South Africa's complex society. Botsotso 17 reflects the depth and creative range of the South African cultural and emotional environment, as well as the broader social currents in which they were spawned; and that the coexisting phenomena of love and violence, alienation and precious comings-together mingle to create a unique, if familiar, panorama as streams of words reveal the inner meanings of so many different lives.

Provides up-to-date profiles on the careers of leading and emerging poets.

The new edition of this highly succesful poetry anthology includes new poems, new notes and exercises, and has a freshly- designed, learning friendly format that makes it even more relevant and accessible to students in Southern Africa

This collection contains five plays by the South African writer Allan Horwitz: The Pump Room; Comrade Babble; Boykie and Girlie; Jericho; and Book Marks. The plays explore the contradictions and dreams of the new and old South Africa, as well as universal themes that include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other moral dilemmas.

The Exploded View, from the masterful South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić, tells the story of four lives intertwined through the sprawling infrastructure on the margins of Johhanesburg: a stastician taking the national census, an engineer out on the town with city officials, an artist interested in genocide, and a contractor who puts up billboards on construction sites. Arcing across distance and time, Vladislavić deftly explodes our comfortable views and brings us behind the curtains of the city while subtly expanding our notions of what is possible in the novel form.

Makhosazana Xaba, with several collections and anthologies to her name, is at the forefront of a poetry that embraces penetrating socio-political insight with highly emotional responses to the love and pain that our country provides in such abundance.

A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: Senselessness, acclaimed Salvadoran author Horacio Castallanos Moya's astounding debut in English, explores horror with hilarity and electrifying panache. A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

At once an exploration of the physical and emotional disappearance of women and a celebration of the magic of shapeshifting as an act of survival, these poems sit in conversation with each other in a way that highlights how women survive and thrive in spite of the obstacles often stacked against them.

From Soweto, from the hilltops of initiation, Siphiwe ka Ngwenya adopts the mantle of Killjoy, dissecting our liberation, questioning our infatuations, baptizing us in the juicy waters of procreation. "Dance, Africa!" he cries, before hitting Hillbrow pavements parading brothels, singing for children whose anger and haste cannot be measured or bulldozed, singing for workers who brave themselves from darkness to darkness while the drumbeat serenades and bass strums compassionate, and then stroking the morning dew, turning poverty into fiction, cuddling loneliness, nakedness entangling with passion while commanding us to rise! to celebrate!