We are excited and proud to announce an upcoming book edited by our project leader, Professor Lindy Stiebel, and Professor Therese Steffen. Letters To My Native Soil: Lewis Nkosi Writes Home is an edited collection of Lewis Nkosi’s email correspondences with South Africans during the later years of his life spent in Basel, Switzerland. While he visited South Africa numerous times since 1994, the collection provides insight as to what it meant to Nkosi to be a writer in exile – whether forced or self-imposed. Set for launch in October 2014, the collection will be published by academic publishers LIT Verlag. Expect news about a launch in the near future.
Therese Steffen is professor of Gender Studies in the Anglophone Context at the University of Basel. Steffen was a Fellow (1995-96), and now is non-resident Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African Research at Harvard University. She focuses on issues of ethnicity, ethics, gender, and literary space, particularly African American, South African and Southasian literature and culture.
Lindy Stiebel is professor of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal, and founder and leader of the KZN Literary Tourism Project. Her research interests include the links between Writers, identity and place, spatial theory and discourse generally; Colonial cartography; the works of nineteenth century writer Rider Haggard and artist-explorer Thomas Baines; literary tourism particularly as evidenced in the KZN Literary Tourism project; the works of Lewis Nkosi; and work by South African Indian writers and the circulation of texts in the Indian Ocean region.
LIT Verlag’s blurb about the book:
Lewis Nkosi’s influence as both South African writer and critic has been profound. His significance stems from the fact that he was one of the very few surviving members of the Drum generation of writers of the 50s, one who continued to write throughout the apartheid and post-apartheid decades. Author of plays, critical essays and novels, Nkosi’s voice is preserved in Letters to My Native Soil which collects email correspondence between the writer and others and provides a valuable insight into a working writer’s life in Europe and at home. The book is illustrated with personal photographs and accompanied by Nkosi’s own work in the form of appendices.
