Zukiswa Wanner is a critically acclaimed South African journalist, novelist and editor who recently released her fifth novel Love, Marry, Kill with South African publisher Kwela. For this seventh edition of A Short Talk, 2025 […]
“I asked the two if they knew where Okot p’Bitek’s grave was. They didn’t, and neither did they know who that was…”
One Sunday evening in 2010, I was at the dinner table, set up with my phone and earphones, indulging in my end-of-week ritual: listening to the classical music show on Capital FM from 9 to […]
i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.
In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting
season, when the rains have appeased the land.
everything I am
is wanting & needing/
every bone, every
hollow, this image/
is a god fashion-made for you/
But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds.
In the church of avian beings.
Small, colorful, and endangered.
I have been thinking recently about how once a story, poem, essay (whatever container holds it) exists in the world, the storyteller no longer holds the pen. The readers bring so much of themselves to the page that when they finish, they leave with a completely different experience from the writer, and even every other reader. I love that