Henrietta Rose-Innes's Blog, page 11
August 12, 2016
NINEVEH UK cover reveal: head full of bugs!
For the UK edition of NINEVEH, due out from Aardvark Bureau in November, superb design company publicide has produced yet another thing of beauty.
Patrick Gale says: “I love Henrietta Rose-Innes’ work. With plotlines that are wittily subversive and language that is whippet-lean, it is long overdue for discovery by a wider readership.”
The design echoes the wonderful cover publicide created for GREEN LION (also out with Aardvark next year).
July 29, 2016
Nineveh, Green Lion on Pinterest
For fun, in the run-up to the UK/US publication of Nineveh (Nov) and the UK publication of Green Lion (March next year), I’ve put together some Pinterest boards. I’ll be adding images that inspired me in the writing of the books, or that resonate with their content and atmosphere. Hope you enjoy.
Carnelian frog amulet, c. 1540-1296 BC, Cleveland Museum of Art
June 28, 2016
Two-book deal with Aardvark Bureau
I’m extremely happy to announce that two of my novels will soon be published in the UK. The innovative publisher Aardvark Bureau will bring out Nineveh this year and Green Lion in 2017, which means that the books will finally be available to British & Commonwealth readers. Nineveh will be published simultaneously in November 2016 by in the USA.
Jane Aitken [of Aardvark] says: In these two masterful novels, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s beautiful prose intrigues, entrances and entertains. We are thrilled to bring Rose-Innes to the UK market.
Henrietta Rose-Innes says: I’m tremendously excited to introduce my books to readers in the UK and elsewhere – and I can’t think of a better home for them than Aardvark Bureau, with its fresh and adventurous list of global titles.
June 13, 2016
How green lion came to be
In the run-up to the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, the Sunday Times (SA) has published an extract from Green Lion, and I briefly discuss the “spark” that brought the novel into being.
Green Lion was written at a time when I was very preoccupied, because of family circumstances, with ageing, mortality and the attempt to rescue what we love from time and oblivion. These old dilemmas are intertwined with the anxiety of environmental change, and are ultimately what drive Con’s hopeless pursuit of Sekhmet, his beloved, impossible, soon-to-be-gone-from-this-world lioness.
The Barry Ronge Prize, which awards “outstanding contributions in fiction”, is the fiction component of the The Sunday Times Literary Awards, South Africa’s most prestigious literary accolade. According to books editor Jennifer Platt, the shortlist represents “books of quality, that take the temperature and pulse of the nation”. Read more about this year’s shortlist here.
June 10, 2016
L’Homme au lion: Green Lion in French
It’s here: the beautiful new French editions of my novel Green Lion – L’Homme au Lion – from the wonderful Editions Zoe (who published Ninive in 2014). Another immaculate translation from Elisabeth Gilles, and great, fresh cover, featuring an ink drawing by Rembrandt of an actual 17th-century extinct Cape Lion – the same breed as the novel’s elusive Sekhmet.
June 9, 2016
Uneasy green: Green Lion review
Graham Riach has written a thoughtful and empathetic review of my novel Green Lion
for the Africa in Words blog.
You feel the shifting textures … and hear with Con the whistling of adrenaline in your ears. Rose-Innes makes us not only see, but feel the atavistic terror of the scene, bringing us as readers back to our embodied animal states … These intense passages punctuate the narrative, giving a powerfully somatic reading experience that allows the reader to share Con’s shock at feeling suddenly and acutely alive.
Rose-Innes’s novel wears its politics lightly. What emerges is an ethically nuanced exploration of the competing claims of individual, familial, societal, and ecological loss. Green Lion is a quietly powerful novel, and a deft exploration of what it means to live on in the absence of those people, places, and things that once constituted the fabric of our lives.
June 8, 2016
HIDE in clear site
On June 9th I’ll be taking part in HIDE – a site-specific performance in beautiful RSPB reserve Strumpshaw Fen in the Broads, Norwich. Along with a talented group of UEA poets, novelists, playwrights and actors, we’ll present a somewhat different tour of Strumpshaw – stories, scenes and sights all inspired by the reserve, its ebbs and flows and birds and birders.
Tours leave reception area at 12.00pm and 1.30pm and run for approximately 40 minutes. This is a free event.
With Coralie Bastiaens, Amy Bonar, Ros Brown, Sóley Linda Egilsdóttir, Eleanor Herzog, Elizabeth Lewis Williams, James McDermott, Jean McNeil, Rosie Quattromini, Mercy Phillips, Jessica Rhodes, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Viðar Stefánsson, Steve Waters
May 19, 2016
‘Porcelain’ in Woman&Home SA
My short story ‘Porcelain’, from my 2010 collection Homing, is featured in this month’s Woman & Home magazine (South Africa). The great news is that they plan to print more local fiction as a regular feature.
May 16, 2016
Green Lion shortlisted for Ronge Prize
Green Lion has made it onto the shortlist for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, the fiction component of the Sunday Times Literary Awards, South Africa’s foremost literary accolade. The shortlist was announced recently at the Franschhoek Literary Festival, and the winner will be announced at an event in Johannesburg on 25 June, 2016.
The full list of shortlisted books is:
Boy on the Wire by Alastair Bruce – Umuzi
The Dream House by Craig Higginson – Picador Africa
The Magistrate of Gower by Claire Robertson – Umuzi
Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes – Umuzi
Hunger Eats a Man by Nkosinathi Sithole – Penguin
The judging panel was chaired by poet Rustum Kozain, and included Angela Makholwa-Moabelo and Stephen Johnson. Kozain remarked that that the listed writers are “in control of the mechanics of storytelling and so the storytellers that emerge, and the stories they tell, compel us. And they compel us – seducing us without revealing the seduction – into fictional worlds that are credible because of the quality of the storytelling”.
April 24, 2016
Interview: La Palabra y el Hombre
The new issue of Mexican cultural magazine La Palabra y el Hombre is out now, featuring a long interview between me and Javier Ahumada Aguirre about my novel Nineveh (published as Nínive by Editorial Almadía) and South African writing in general. The interview took place last year in the beautiful town of Xalapa, during the Mexican launch tour of Nínive. Nínive was also recently warmly reviewed in Mexican magazine Nexos.
@HenriettaRI It’s finally out. I just, just got it. This issue of @PalabrayHombre is really quite beautiful pic.twitter.com/B7X6GfGYGx
— Javier con jota (@jahumag) April 23, 2016
