The Interpreters
A landmark anthology of literary nonfiction from Southern Africa.
Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has seen an outpouring of longform, narrative journalism and creative nonfiction – genres in which some of the country’s finest writers have tried to make sense of a complex and changing society. This brand new, one-of-a-kind anthology collects some of the best literary nonfiction published since the end of apartheid.
From the underworld of zama zama goldminers to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids, The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction assembles a range of true stories that are as compelling as any fiction.
Literary nonfiction in South Africa has often been found at the margins of our media – in zines, journals, now defunct magazines and personal blogs. It is a kind of writing that has, in general, not made much financial sense – more a medium for those obsessed with pursuing a single story over months or years. In The Interpreters, the editors have combed through 30 years of post-apartheid writing to produce a collection that combines preeminent names with lesser known but no less immersive and powerful works of creative journalism – disparate views and voices that, when read together, have created a new topography of South Africa’s recent past.
Published by Soutie Press. Cover design by Gretchen van der Byl.
Order via Soutie Press (South Africa), Amazon (rest of the world) or on Kindle.
“This anthology honours a form of writing that has long lived on the periphery of South Africa’s publishing economy. The longform essay. The deeply reported fragment. The story that takes months, sometimes years, to unfold. It’s subtitled the “new non-fiction”, but really it feels like an ancient artefact, polished and restored to its former glory. [...] One of my first published essays was over 6,500 words; a piece on Cape Town’s then-emerging jazz scene, written for Chimurenga Chronic, back when it was still possible to explore a single story with the care, depth and temporal generosity it deserved. This kind of writing rarely makes commercial sense, but it’s where some of the most urgent, lyrical, and politically textured storytelling still lives.”
My introduction to the anthology.
Interpreting The Interpreters. Q&A with the editors. Lifestyling, 2 June 2025.
“Q: Given that Hedley and you are friends, how did the book come to be, and how did you enjoy the process of working alongside one another?
A: It has quite a long history. We have been friends since schooldays, and corresponded about books throughout our university years, including an eclectic mix of nonfiction, and I mean super-eclectic: everything from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space to Deneys Reitz’s Commando. We were into the work of British psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, and his London Orbital, about walking London’s M25, inspired a very precocious decision to move to Cape Town to do something similar with the city’s main road, which runs from the Castle of Good Hope to Simon’s Town. We completely failed to write that book, but we both took the experience of trying to write it into other things: Hedley into his PhD thesis, and I continued to haunt the lower part of the city, and ultimately wrote a book about a community of maritime stowaways living under the foreshore flyovers (Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard). We never imagined we would try and do another book together, but once we started talking about this project it just flowed. Assembling The Interpreters did not feel like work at all, more like the intensification of a long-running conversation. A joy, to be honest.”
A cocktail of true and false. Financial Mail 15 May, 2025.
A powerhouse of new South African nonfiction. LitNet 3 June, 2025.
‘The Interpreters’ is outstanding. TimesLive 5 June, 2025.
“Writing is the one art that compels the writer to explore and express complex feelings and thoughts through an attempt at simplicity and concreteness that are yet able to preserve the complexity.”
“I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented, there is so much to it, the truth is varied and scattered across the world. [...] So, what do I do? I gather together the feelings, ideas, words of everydayness. I put together the life of my times. I’m interested in the history of the soul, the being of the soul. All that the larger history usually misses out on, all that it is condescending towards. So I work on all the history that goes missing.”