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#ReadingAfrica Week 2023

Welcome to our favorite time of the year— #ReadingAfrica Week!

Each year, during the first full week of December, we celebrate the richness and diversity of African literature all across social media, all week long.

We started #ReadingAfrica Week in 2017, and each year we ask book-lovers of all kinds to use the hashtags #ReadingAfrica or #ReadingAfricaWeek across social media on posts that spotlight African literature.

We started this campaign to bring attention to writers who are doing diverse and genre-spanning work from every corner of the African continent. And because we’re an indie publisher, we really wanted to spotlight all of the great things our colleagues in the indie publishing world are doing to bring these voices to more readers.

Our first year was small: we reached out to just a few presses and asked them to use the hashtag on their social media posts to spotlight new books, old favorites, upcoming releases, and gems from their catalogs to show people the diversity of African literature. From that first campaign, #ReadingAfrica has only grown in scope and reach. We’ve included events, and we’ve had participants from four continents, spanning fields and organizations such as libraries, schools, publishers, writers and more. The past two years have also marked our including a companion #ReadingAfrica playlist, one curated by a member of acclaimed Afro-funk band, Sinkane, and another by a DJ/artist.

Each year, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the support of readers and publishers from around the globe, each eager to celebrate African literature. Africa is a place with incalculable stories to tell, and our goal each year is to prioritize African voices, spark conversation, and to resist the flattening of a place with limitless possibilities.

And this year, we want to help you keep #ReadingAfrica, this week, and for many weeks to come. When you purchase our books through our IndiePubs page, not only will you be supporting us with your purchase, but all this month you can save 25% off of your purchase when you use the code READINGAFRICA at checkout. This is our way of saying thank you for another great year of reading and community.

Keep up with us all week long as we spotlight the great writing coming from Africa and the diaspora, and be sure to join us for one of our three live events. All are free, but registration is required. Keep reading to learn more!

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Holiday Gift Guide

It’s reading season! The Catalyst team has assembled some of our favorites for all the book-lovers on your gift list this year!

Got a young bookworm at home? Here are my top picks for teen and tween readers.—SarahBelle Selig, South African office manager/publicity

A young boy brings his community together in a creative way in The Cedarville Shop & the Wheelbarrow Swap. Set in the last days of South Africa’s apartheid-era, Halley’s Comet finds three teens in an unlikely friendship, bound by a shared secret. An ancient prophesy sets 16-year-old Ebba on a quest to save the world in The Thousand Steps, book one of the Fiery Spiral trilogy.

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Author Q&A: Kendra Powers

We’ve published a lot of young creators here at Catalyst Press, but none as young as Kendra Powers, my awesome fourteen-year-old niece whose photo book, Bait the Toad, comes out this month. Featuring photos of Kendra’s pet toad Bait, whose sassy photo shoots became an overnight TikTok sensation, Bait the Toad is a side-splitting, quicky gift book that would make a great holiday gift for animal lovers of any age. I sat down with Kendra to chat about Bait, her new book, and her impressive crafting skills.

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Q&A with Tsitsi Mapepa

Introducing our readers to new and emerging voices in the literary space is our favorite thing to do here at Catalyst Press. One voice in particular stands out to me this year: Tsitsi Mapepa, the debut author of Ndima Ndima, which releases on November 7th.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, now living in New Zealand, Tsitsi received her Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland in 2020. Her work is honest, heart-wrenching, and illuminating—and we are so honored to share it with our readers. Booklist calls Ndima Ndima “[a] truly insightful debut from an exciting new Zimbabwean author with a talent for writing the human experience,” and we couldn’t agree more! 

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tsitsi and chat a little bit about this incredible story. 

Tsitsi Mapepa

SarahBelle Selig: Tsitsi. thank you so much for making time to speak with me! To start off, tell me about the process of writing Ndima Ndima. 

Tsitsi Mapepa: I am a perfectionist, I want things organized, but when it comes to my writing, I am a pantser (I work by the seat of my pants). The stories in Ndima Ndima were never written in order. It helped me when I got stuck, unsure of what to write following the finished story. So I jumped to the most exciting stories I had in mind. I still do this, even when I’m writing a novel. I know some writers would find it strange and time consuming when it comes to structural development, but that’s just how I craft my stories.

SS: Have you always enjoyed writing?

TM: Yes, I started writing when I was young. When I was in high school I attempted writing a novel, which I never finished. And I also wrote a collection of poetry on loose papers and notebooks.

SS: You emigrated from Zimbabwe in 2007. What was been your expat experience? Did writing Ndima Ndima feel like going home?

TM: I moved to New Zealand because my husband was already here. So, for the two of us, it was a new beginning. For me, the most challenging thing was raising our children in the absence of our closed ones. In our culture, we strongly rely on other family members for extra support.

When it came to creating the landscape in Ndima Ndima, it was like scraping for the images of a home buried at the core of my heart. This part of the novel left me with a smiling soul, because I could see what I miss on the page.

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Catalyst South Africa: Q&A with SarahBelle Selig & Izak de Vries

While our authors make us special, without SarahBelle Selig and Izak de Vries as part of our team, Catalyst Press would be missing a huge part of its heart and soul. While our U.S. team members keep things humming a world away, these two have made us a truly international company. Whether through their connections with South Africa’s literary community, or with the kind of personal touch that only comes from a face-to-face meeting, they have helped build Catalyst South Africa into, what we hope, is a part of the local reading scene. We couldn’t do any of this without them. Ashawnta Jackson, a U.S.-based Catalyst team member, chatted to the pair about their work.

SarahBelle Selig and Izak de Vries

SarahBelle, can you tell us a bit about your role at Catalyst? What is the South African branch up to?

Specifically in South Africa, I’ve got a bit of a liaison role, which means I’m working face to face with our local authors, our South African distributor, and the many great booksellers and educators we’re connected with here. Izak and I also tag team our local publicity: everything from getting reviews for our authors in South African media, to getting them on panels at festivals.

We’re having so much fun at Catalyst South Africa these days! We’ve ramped up our events, from book launches and comics workshops, to author readings at local school libraries and even a beach cleanup. We hosted a booth at the inaugural Comic Con Cape Town to show off our amazing line up of African graphic novels and to connect with readers. We’re busy prepping the release of our first ever Afrikaans book for kids, and we’re actively building out our relationships with local nonprofits, bookstores, and schools. The Catalyst office is definitely the most active here that it’s ever been, I’d say.

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Peter Church on his Dark Web Trilogy

Editor’s Note: We’re revisiting this 2020 Q&A with Peter because now you can buy all three of his thrillers in one convenient bundle! The Dark Web Trilogy bundle is out on May 16, and pre-orders are available now.

Peter Church’s Dark Web Trilogy takes readers to the dark side of our digital lives. Starting with Crackerjack, these interconnected techno-thrillers explore the dangers lurking in a shadowy, underground world where the virtual and the physical collide in dangerous ways. The final installment in the series, Bitter Pill, comes to US readers on June 15. We caught up with Peter to chat about the series, his process for writing these connected stories, and if we might see more from the characters his created.

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March Events with Bridget Pitt

March will be a busy month for Eye Brother Horn author, Bridget Pitt. Not only will she be basking in the glow of her great reviews (the newest from World Literature Today calls it a “heartwarming—and wrenching—tale”), but she’ll be having two in-person event in South Africa.

Join her at the Book Lounge in Cape Town on March 16 at 6pm. She’ll be in conversation with literary critic, David Atwell. Visit the Book Lounge’s website to RSVP.

And on March 29, she heads to Johannesburg for a conversation with Pippa Smith, owner of The Book Revue. The event begins at 6:30pm and will be held at Glenshiel Mansion. Tickets are R150 all all profits will be donated to Friends of the Wild. Email pippa [at] thebookrevue.co.za to RSVP.

Eye Brother Horn, a sweeping tale of colonialism, identity, kinship, and atonement set in 1870s South Africa, is out now.

The Writer’s Notebook: Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

via Windham-Campbell Prize

As many of you know, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu won a Windham-Campbell award in 2022. It has been a whirlwind here ever since, so we can only imagine what it’s like for Siphiwe! We’re a tiny press with a tiny staff, but we have such an enormous love for our authors and their books, and the Windham-Campbell Prize recognizing one of those authors feels amazing. As part of her award tour, Siphiwe has been featured in the Yale Review‘s special Windham-Campbell issue and, most recently, just wrote a beautiful essay for the Windham-Campbell “Writer’s Notebook” series.

We couldn’t be prouder to publish Siphiwe’s gorgeous and innovative writing. Her award-winning novels The Theory of Flight and The History of Man are both out now, with the final book in her City of Kings Trilogy, The Quality of Mercy, out this fall. Below is an excerpt of her Writer’s Notebook piece where she discusses the inspiration for The Quality of Mercy.

I will always say this because it is true—my grandmother was a phenomenal storyteller. She could make any story come into Technicolor life: an oral fable passed down through the generations, an unexpectedly spectacular thing that one of her students had done, a past event that she retrieved from the vast treasure trove that was her memory. A few years before she died in 2014, she told me a story about a man who instantly fell so in love with a woman that he followed her all the way to her village where he was immediately set the task of solving a mystery in order to win her hand in marriage. This story was the genesis of what would become my third novel, The Quality of Mercy.

Read the full essay here

Author Q&A: Bridget Pitt

Today, I have the honor of chatting with Bridget Pitt, the author of Eye Brother Horn, which we have the privilege of publishing here at Catalyst Press. 

An activist, a critically-acclaimed author, and a fascinating conversationalist, Bridget’s newest novel is an evocative look into the history of colonial South Africa as seen through the eyes of two young boys—Daniel, the son of white missionaries, and Moses, a Zulu orphan abandoned on a riverbank—who are raised as brothers on the mission of Umzinyathi in Zululand. I’ll never forget the first time I read this book, and I know you won’t either. To get you started, be sure to visit Literary Hub to read an excerpt from the novel.

In this chat, Bridget and I discuss the meaning of nationality, her literary influences, how she discovers the voices of her characters, and so much more. Let’s get started!

SarahBelle Selig: Hi Bridget, thanks for joining me! I’d love to start with you telling our readers a bit about your writing background.  You’ve definitely seen some great success in your early forays into fiction, with your first crime novel being shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2011, and for the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. But you were also an outspoken environmental and human rights activist in South Africa for many years, and actively spoke out as a journalist against apartheid policies. In what ways is this new story a continuation of that work? How does writing fiction feel different to you, and within fiction, what genres appeal to you?

Bridget Pitt: Eye Brother Horn is my fourth novel, and my first foray into the historical fiction. My first and third books were literary fiction, with the second straddling crime and literary fiction. I realised when writing this book that I was not cut out to be a writer of crime fiction, although I occasionally enjoy reading it.  But as a writer I am more compelled by the motivations and the relationships of the characters, and by the unraveling and re-knitting of people’s lives that follow acts of violence, than by how a crime is solved. 

Bridget Pitt

For me the spark of a novel may be a character, a relationship, a story, or just a place … the seed for my third novel was a burnt-out hotel in the Drakensberg mountains.  Literary fiction allows for the greatest flexibility in weaving these elements into a narrative.

I have co-authored one non-fiction book, a memoir and spiritual reflection of a wilderness guide and friend, Sicelo Mbatha, and a commissioned book on urban nature conservation. I found it both soothing and constraining working within the boundaries of non-fiction after the lawless expanse of fiction. If the right project popped up I’d be up for writing more non-fiction, but even when working on non-fiction assignments I find myself turning everything into a story. 

My own activism has always been strengthened and inspired by fiction written with a critical social lens. Story telling is inherently transformative, and can be a powerful medium for advancing insights, provoking questions, and catalysing change. Writing fiction enables me to explore some of the nuances and complexities of social transitions which cannot easily be conveyed in polemical nonfiction. My writing and activism breathe life into each other, although I am acutely aware of the need to trust the reader to draw their own conclusions, rather than driving social points for home with a sledge hammer. 

SS: I know you looked into your own family’s history in the research for Eye Brother Horn. You were born in Zimbabwe, raised in South Africa, but you have European ancestors. What do you consider your nationality? What does nationality mean to you?

BP: The Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe tells us that the human is not a thing within a territory, the human is a territory. Nationality, in the sense of the country where you hold citizenship, is one of many forces that shape our inner ‘territory’. But it’s a continuously evolving and intangible force, and the compatriots of a country as contested as South Africa doubtlessly hold wildly differing ideas of what their nationality means to them.

Like all humans, I am a territory with an entanglement of many different geographical and cultural reference points. I grew up with my eyes turned north – three grandparents had immigrated from England, one was a third generation South African. I was raised on A. A. Milne, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain.  I knew about the renaissance, the impressionists, the cubists, I listened to Rachmaninoff and the Rolling Stones. My father fell in love with Italy when he was stationed there in the Second World War, and took me there at the age of 13 to marvel at the wonders of European ‘civilisation’. My maternal grandparents were quintessentially English, offering afternoon tea and scones to be taken while flipping through back copies of the London Illustrated News featuring photos of stocky Royal princelings in tweed jackets (I envied them not because they were royalty but because they seemed to have unlimited access to ponies).

I was not given the benefit of learning an indigenous language other than Afrikaans, although I tried to pick up isiZulu at the lively gatherings hosted by our family housekeeper in our backyard. The little South African “history” I was taught at school was a grandiose and tedious fantasy about God helping the Boers and Brits to defeat unruly local tribes. I knew almost nothing of African art, music, mythology or beliefs. 

My older siblings left South Africa for England as soon as they could, but I did not feel the same pull. I felt deeply connected to the South Africa landscape, to the Drakensberg mountains where we hiked every winter, to the highveld grasslands around Johannesburg where I rode horses. I went to university in 1976, and soon became immersed in the anti-apartheid struggle. What drew me was not only a strong belief in the cause, but also for the first time in my life I could interact with my fellow black South Africans as comrades. Of course, there was much complexity in that relationship, and my comrades were quick to disabuse me of any feelings of arrogance or tendency to patronise that came with growing up as a white person in apartheid South Africa.  This experience was profoundly transforming, and strengthened both my connections to the place and its people, and my resolve to fight for a more just and equal society. Unfortunately, we are still striving to achieve this. But I never seriously contemplated leaving South Africa after this time. 

I left Zimbabwe at the age of two and have no memories of it, although I have visited a few times and found it to be a beautiful country with many creative, resilient and resourceful people, notwithstanding successive dictators. My parents emigrated there in 1950 to escape the newly elected National Party and its racist agenda but were forced to return 10 years later due to financial difficulties. When I was a child, I would look at the sepia photos of our house in what was then Salisbury, with its chickens and vegetable gardens, and feel that I had been cheated out of an idyllic youth by being born too late. But the connection was more to some imaginary country home than to the actual place. 

So I guess the territory that is me is woven with threads from of many lands, but if I had to choose a single label it would be South African. [Editor’s Note: Be sure to watch Bridget as part of our #ReadingAfrica Week panel, “Who Is African: Place, Identity, and Belonging in Literature” for longer discussion on this question]

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Author Q&A: Pearl of the Sea, Part 2

And we’re back! We rejoin the Pearl of Sea team in part two of our Q&A. Missed part one? Check it out here to get all caught up. We’ll wait….

Now that that’s all set, let’s jump back in to the conversation with the writers and illustrators of our newest graphic novel, Pearl of the Sea. Pearl joins a host of new and forthcoming releases as part of Panel & Page, our series of graphic novels for readers of all ages. You’ll be hearing a lot more about other books in the series in the coming months.

In part two of our conversation, Anthony, Raffaella, and Willem discuss the process of bringing words and images together, their love of comics books, and how their new book shows “the importance of opening up and not being scared of showing our vulnerabilities.”

Order Pearl of the Sea here

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