It has been 21 years since the dawn of democracy in South Africa. To mark the “coming of age” of the nation, Melanie Verwoerd and Sonwabiso Ngcow travelled across South Africa collecting the life stories of people born in 1994. These “born frees” relate their personal journeys, dreams and hopes for the future of the country. The brutally honest voices of these 21-year-olds, challenging and disturbing, as well as funny and hopeful, give an invaluable insight into modern day South Africa.
ISBN 978-0-9946702-0-5
Format: Paperback; 222mm X 152mm (Portrait)
Pages: 200
Recommended retail price: R220
CATEGORY: Non-fiction / Biography
In 1987, Sibi Makhale is allowed to visit her dying father in the maximum security prison of Robben Island. The daughter of banned parents, Sibi comes face to face with two suspicious and frightened white schoolteachers resident on the island. It will prove to be a life-changing experience for all of them. Over two decades later, Sibi returns to the Island – now a World Heritage Site – with her two born-free sons. It is an attempt at closure for her, an adventure for her boys, and for the reader a remarkable journey back from the dark past. Panorama celebrates the people who through their shared passion for a beloved country managed to communicate and even laugh with each other in spite of fear, guilt and prejudice. This story about South Africa’s yesterday and today is inspired by Pieter-Dirk Uys’s internationally acclaimed play, Panorama.
The first large collection of poems since his Shelley Cinema of 2006 and the anthology, Invitation to a Voyage: French-Language Poetry of the Indian Ocean African Islands, both launched at the Poetry Africa Festival in Durban, and his slim volume, Taking Off of 2012.
A young gay man bewildered and lost on the highways of Los Angeles; a sadomasochist Neo-Nazi in Berlin; a rent boy in Shanghai; a holiday romance in Mexico; a man from Dakar in a bathhouse in Paris; a love hotel in Tokyo; a darkroom in Rio; a hamam in Syria; the burning ghats on the Ganges; Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Shinto and atheist; legal and illegal … blazing through 18 countries on six continents, 80 Gays Around the World is an explicit, upfront, edgy, often funny travel adventure that will leave you seeing the world and yourself with different eyes. 
Five Lives at Noon follows a generation of young South Africans turning 30 during the turbulent years from the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 to the day of the first democratic election in 1994.