I’m happy to share the news that A Hibiscus Coast won the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award at the 2022 South African Literary Awards on 7 November.
Thank you to the organisers and judges for the kind recognition, and congratulations too to Mzoli Mavimbela, the co-winner of the prize for his novel in isiXhosa, Amazwembezwembe KaGxuluwe.
Thank you to my South African publisher (and editor on this book) Karina at Karavan Press, to my agent Charles, and my friends and family.
I’m proud to announce the publication in South Africa of my second collection of poems, The Book of Unrest. It will be published by uHlanga on 1 November 2022.
An ocean of floodwater. Shipwrecked toddlers. Skeletons that rise from pristine beaches. In his second book of poems, Nick Mulgrew confronts the natural and human disasters of the eastern South African coast – and, in the process, himself.
An unflinching examination of ancestry and place, of ruined childhoods and a troubled present, The Book of Unrest conjures a world of alternating beauty and horror; a series of tainted land-, city- and seascapes, increasingly hostile to those living in them. Drawing upon the wisdom of other Durban writers, Mulgrew interrogates the purposes of poetry and politics in such a fraught time and place. Can our traumas be learned from, or do they only shackle us to the past?
In turns elegiac and nihilistic, witty and desperate, sprawling and precise, these poems sift through personal and collective histories of mistrust and violence, to find what, if anything, can bring us rest.
More information can be found on my books page, or on uHlanga’s website.
I’m stoked to be heading back to Sweden this year for Novellfest in beautiful Lund. I’ll be chatting on the Sunday with fellow South African Siphiwo Mahala on the art of short fiction, and then spending the next ten days or so at a writing residency at Hedlandet.
Thank you to everyone who has made this trip possible for me.