Since our launch in May, we have published eight issues of reviews, interviews, essays, poetry, photography and short fiction. From Imraan Coovadia’s take on the sensational exposé The President’s Keepers to Bongani Madondo’s appraisal of Koleka Putuma’s blockbuster debut poetry collection Collective Amnesia; from Julie Nxadi’s exquisite short fiction to Victor Dlamini’s striking literary photography; and from Percy Zvomuya’s marvelous bookish excavations to the elegant prose verse of Rustum Kozain—we believe we have much to take pride in from our first year of existence.

Take a stroll with The JRB through our first volume; here are our top fifty most popular posts from 2017.

Reviews

• All the President’s Keepers: Imraan Coovadia reviews Jacques Pauw’s sensational exposé on Jacob Zuma and the gangster state
• Portrait of the poet as a young genius: Bongani Madondo reviews Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia
• The anthology we have been waiting for: Panashe Chigumadzi reviews Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins
• All too exhilarating: Wamuwi Mbao reviews Naomi Alderman’s Baileys Prize-shortlisted sci-fi novel The Power
• A steady vigil over the slow death of the anti-apartheid dream: Rustum Kozain reviews Kelwyn Sole’s latest poetry collection, Walking, Falling
• Mak Manaka: One horny m’fcker – Bongani Madondo reviews Flowers of a Broken Smile
• Step on the Bassline: Bongani Madondo unlocks a torrent of Joburg memories
• Spectacular collisions of perspectives in Grace A Musila’s A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder
• Beware of angels and other executives of perfection: Wamuwi Mbao appraises JM Coetzee’s Late Essays

Fiction

• New short fiction: ‘Love Back’ by Julie Nxadi
• [Fiction issue] ‘Lolwethu Oluthando’, a short story by Julie Nxadi
• New short fiction from Short Story Day Africa: ‘Things We Found North of the Sunset’ by Aba Asibon
• [Fiction issue] ‘Child’s Play’, a short story by Gloria Mwaniga Minage
• New short fiction from Queer Africa 2: ‘Nine Pieces of Desire’ by Idza L
• [Fiction issue] Excerpt from Moan of the Marabou by Akbar Hussain
• [Fiction issue] ‘Boy’, new short fiction by Yewande Omotoso

Essays

• James Baldwin in Rhodesia: Percy Zvomuya picks out a thread from the forgotten war book Black Fire!
• ‘It began with a burial site’: Nadia Davids on her new work, What Remains, a play about slavery and the haunted city
• A guide for writing from the outside in: Sisonke Msimang on how Howard W French maps the road between the Africa of her childhood and the China of her imagination
• ‘Speaking Shona was associated with humiliation’: Petina Gappah on the influence, on her writing, of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind
• Rights of Conquest, Rights of Desire: Panashe Chigumadzi considers the black female body through a return to JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
• On Things Fall Apart and Things Falling Apart: Simon van Schalkwyk considers modernism in the here and now
• Making space for women in South Africa’s political memory, or, the case of the non-intersection of Pixley ka Seme and Charlotte Maxeke Streets
• [City Editor] Niq Mhlongo meets Shaka Zulu at a restaurant in Cologne, Germany
• ‘Writing is sometimes like a thread that weaves all our hearts into one’: Lidudumalingani reflects on his Caine Prize visit to the United States
• ‘Three great hopes for a post-apartheid culture, gone too soon’ – Hedley Twidle reflects on Phaswane Mpe, Moses Taiwa Molelekwa and K Sello Duiker
• [City Editor] A miracle under the apricot tree in Chi Town: How a writer came to name Maboneng

Photography

• Ten years, thirty portraits: A Victor Dlamini retrospective

Interviews

• English here is the foreign language: A conversation with Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, author of Season of Crimson Blossoms
• Exclusive interview: Petina Gappah speaks about the highs and lows of her writing career, and reveals details of her next book
• [Exclusive interview and audio] ‘White fragility ends discussions … and ends lives’: Claudia Rankine speaks in Soweto
• ‘You’re not a rejection machine, you’re a search engine’, or, the art of the literary review: A conversation with Philip Gourevitch
• [Temporary Sojourner] How little has changed in thirty-nine years: Efemia Chela reads Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger
• Finding beauty under apartheid: Interview with Dan Magaziner, and excerpt from his book The Art of Life in South Africa
• ‘With any luck people will be reading The Sellout fifty years from now’ – an interview with Man Booker Prize-winning author Paul Beatty

Poetry

• New poetry by Rustum Kozain: ‘When I write’
• New poetry by Ingrid de Kok: ‘Closed for Reasons of Joy’
• Two poems by Rethabile Masilo
• Two new poems by Nii Ayikwei Parkes
• Four Poems by Kelwyn Sole
• New poetry by Simon van Schalkwyk: ‘Hay-on-Wye’

News

• Remembering Marechera: Humboldt University hosts archive of the Zimbabwean author’s estate
• ‘How to write about everything’: Binyavanga Wainaina on the problems faced by African writers, and how to overcome them

The JRB Daily, our blog

• [The JRB Daily] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pays touching tribute to Binyavanga Wainaina: ‘A great and rare and genuine talent’
• [The JRB Daily] JM Coetzee reads a new story, ‘The Glass Abattoir’, and announces a new book to feature Elizabeth Costello
• [The JRB Daily] Obituary: Professor Phil Bonner (1945—2017)
• [The JRB Daily] English Academy of Southern Africa Award winners announced
• [The JRB Daily] Five African authors up for world’s richest annual literary prize, the International Dublin Literary Award
• [The JRB Daily] Fiction is essential in a corrupt society—Read Zakes Mda’s Sunday Times Literary Awards keynote address
• [The JRB Daily] Tribute to the extraordinary Dambudzo Marechera, thirty years after his death