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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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: Richard Conyngham

We’re so excited for the upcoming release of All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa, a graphic history of six untold legal cases that shaped the civil rights history of South Africa. Set during the pre-apartheid years, the acts of resistance and rebellion brought to life in All Rise were spearheaded by ordinary citizens from marginalized communities on a mission to improve the safety and freedoms of themselves and their loved ones. Each story is illustrated by a different South African illustrator, creating a visually arresting anthology representative of the vast beauty and complex multicultural history of the “Rainbow Nation”.

I’ve been an observer of this project from afar for many years, so it’s thrilling to see it all come together in print. And today I have the privilege of chatting with the author and historian behind the anthology, Richard Conyngham. Born and raised in South Africa and now living in Mexico City, Richard has degrees from the University of Cape Town and Cambridge University and many years of education and literary work under his belt, having worked with organizations like Equal Education, The Bookery, the London publisher Slightly Foxed, and the edtech organization MakeTomorrow. Back in 2016, he collaborated on his first graphic history with the Trantaal Brothers, an artist duo out of Cape Town (who also illustrated a chapter of All Rise), to create an illustrated companion to the O’Regan-Pikoli Commission of Inquiry into policing in Khayelitsha. 

Richard spent the last six years researching and creating All Rise, and all that hard work has paid off to create a truly amazing end result. The collection is getting all sorts of hype from big names in the literary, comics and history worlds alike–including a Starred (!!) review from Kirkus–and we can’t wait to share the book with you when it hits the shelves on May 17th.

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What’s New in 2022

Fall is in the air here (translation: I’m already cold). As the calendar pages start falling away on 2021, we thought it’d be a good time to give you all a little sneak peek at our upcoming titles— many of which are available for pre-order.

We’re excited to add more books from one of our favorite children’s authors, Niki Daly, our very first young adult book in translation, and a new addition to our growing list of graphic novels. In addition to those, we think there’s something for just about every kind of reader in our 2022 catalog. Continue reading “What’s New in 2022”

This Week in Literary News: Week of June 27

Congratulations are in order for author Tsitsi Dangarembga. The author and filmmaker who was recently shortlisted for the Booker Award for her novel This Mournable Body, has just been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She is the first Black woman to win the prize. We love Tsitsi around these parts, not just because she’s an amazing writer, but that she has championed two of our books— Young Blood by Sifiso Mzobe and The Theory of Fight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu—naming them as two of her favorite books in a Vulture article last year, and providing a blurb for Siphiwe’s novel.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu | Photo © Joanne Olivier

And speaking of Siphiwe and congratulations, she was shortlisted for the Writing Gender residency sponsored by Huza Press and the Goethe Institut Kigali. The residency supports two authors–one African and one German—as “they complete or make significant advances with a work-in-progress novel manuscript.” The program hopes to make space “for opening up conversations about gender, its modes of construction, histories, representation and relationality to power.” We are so proud to publish Siphiwe’s novels, The Theory of Flight (out now) and The History of Man (coming January 2022). Good luck, Siphiwe!

Mahogany Browne has been named the first poet-in-residence at New York’s Lincoln Center. As the New York Times reports, the residency “will run from July to September and will include in-person and virtual events such as poetry readings, film screenings, discussions and performances.” Continue reading “This Week in Literary News: Week of June 27”

This Week in Literary News: Week of June 20

DISRUPTION

In Catalyst Press news, the winners of this year’s Short Story Day Africa Prize have been announced! We’re thrilled to be releasing Disruption, the newest Short Story Day Africa anthology, to the North American market in September. Disruption features stories from 21 new and emerging authors from across Africa, including the winning short stories of this year’s prize. Pre-orders are available now.

In celebrity book news, beloved British television host Graham Norton has a new memoir, James Patterson and Bill Clinton are back with more tropes, and Jared Kushner and President Joe Biden’s sister both signed book deals (sigh). And most important, Tsitsi Dangarembga became the first Black woman to win the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade! Go Tsitsi!

A literary heritage project in Australia is trying to save the nation’s books, and five organizations across the United States have started a collective fundraiser in support of Black literary arts. This week commemorates 121 years since the loss of the Hanlin Library (the what, you ask?). And in case you needed another reason to hate AmazonContinue reading “This Week in Literary News: Week of June 20”