After a pleasant day that perhaps included a light lunch in Hotel Zator, they would write postcards to family or…
The cover image for the November 2018 issue of The JRB is excerpted from the new book Johannesburg Then and…
Aminatta Forna sat down with The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town to talk about her new novel,…
Flares exploded in the sky. Stun grenades fired into the water. From the dunes came a volley of gunshots. It…
It’s awards season in the French-speaking literary world! A number of big prizes revealed their longlists in the month of…
The 2018 South African Literary Awards shortlists have been announced, with nominees including Malebo Sephodi, Nick Mulgrew, Kelwyn Sole and…
Arundhati Roy visited South Africa on a book tour recently, and sat down with The JRB to discuss her highly…
The story told in The Lost Boys of Bird Island warps South Africa’s history beyond the nightmares of colonialism and apartheid,…
The JRB presents ‘On Patrol in the Dark City’, an excerpt from I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and…
Image: Jacques Pauw (right) with Stephen Long of Nielsen Book group The President’s Keepers by investigative journalist Jacques Pauw has…
Indian writer Arundhati Roy, in South Africa on a book tour, sat down with The JRB to discuss her books…
VS Naipaul, who died aged eighty-five on Saturday, spent some months in South Africa in 2009, researching his final book….
‘History is created in the mouth …’ Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and The JRB Contributing Editor Panashe Chigumadzi both have new…
Torn for so long between anxiety and awe at the idolisation of Nelson Mandela, The JRB Contributing Editor Bongani Madondo…
Born to Kwaito: Reflections on the Kwaito Generation cranks up the volume of the unsung and barely documented soundtrack of ‘freedom’,…
Chigumadzi’s exploration of personal, family and national history reincarnates in stark, vivid images, many of those interred in the shadows…
By recentering the narrative on Durban and Natal, rather than Johannesburg and the Transvaal, Jon Soske modifies the established account…
The JRB is proud to present an excerpt from Africa’s Cause Must Triumph: The Collected Writings of AP Mda. Africa’s Cause…
This July marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart. Lebohang Mojapelo reviews…
Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, reissued fourteen years after its first publication, endures in the quality of its writing and…
The JRB Francophone and Contributing Editor Efemia Chela reviews Not One Day, Anne Garréta’s memoir and the second of her books to be…
‘Johannesburg is a fragmented city. It is not a place of smoothly integrated parts. And it has a name that…
‘I dedicate this win to my mother and my father, who never went to school. It just shows what…
The JRB City Editor Niq Mhlongo reviews Clinton Chauke’s debut book, Born in Chains: The Diary of an Angry ‘Born Free’. Born…
Pwaangulongii Dauod has won the R25 000 Gerald Kraak Award, which honours African writing and photography that ‘provokes thought on the…
The shortlists for this year’s Sunday Times Literary Awards have been announced! The Alan Paton Award for Non-fiction and the…
Ntombizikhona Valela considers two very different books, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 and Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob’s…
Adekeye Adebajo reviews Woman in the Wings by Carien du Plessis, offering concluding reflections on Agenda 2063, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma’s dubious…
Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, Feel Free, is a too-rare pleasure, writes The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec. Not many…
Panashe Chigumadzi’s new book, These Bones Will Rise Again, will be out from United Kingdom-based independent publisher The Indigo Press in June….
Image: Bob Marley performing at the Zimbabwe Independence celebration, Rufaro Stadium, Harare, 18 April 1980 The new issue of Chimurenga’s…
The JRB’s Academic Editor Simon van Schalkwyk spoke to UK academic, historian and philosopher Paul Gilroy, who was in Johannesburg…
Richard Poplak reviews 12 Rules For Life by Jordan B Peterson, ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world…
Nomavenda Mathiane’s Eyes in the Night: An Untold Zulu Story illuminates the times, spaces and voices in-between, writes The JRB…
Achille Mbembe’s vision is a guide to the revolution that stands on the other side of revolution, writes Imraan Coovadia. Critique…
Comment sauver son enfant d’une mort certaine ? Faut-il, comme le croit le père de l’auteur, faire confiance à l’école…
The 2018 Sunday Times Literary Awards longlists have been announced! The awards celebrate ‘the best of South African non-fiction and…
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has died in Johannesburg at the age of eighty-one. Read an excerpt from her prison journal, published in 2013,…
The Land is Ours is Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s first book, and it must not be his last, writes Perfect Hlongwane. The…
The Monk of Mokha’s easygoing optimism glides over the prejudices and hatred that underdog minorities face in the United States,…
