WELCOME to gabeba.com, the website of Gabeba Baderoon. Gabeba is the author of the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005), and A hundred silences (2006). The Silence Before Speaking, a volume of her poetry translated into Swedish, is published by Tranan publishers. The Dream in the Next Body was named a Notable Book of 2005 by the Sunday Independent in South Africa and was a Sunday Times Recommended Book. A hundred silences was short-listed for the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize and the 2007 Olive Schreiner Award. In 2005, Gabeba received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry and held the Guest Writer Fellowship at the Nordic Africa Institute, the second person after Ama Ata Aidoo to receive this honour. In 2008, Gabeba was the recipient of a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy and a Writer's Residency at the University of Witwatersrand. Gabeba has read at international literary festivals such as Winternachten in the Netherlands, Poetry International in Rotterdam and London, the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica, the Stockholm Poetry Festival, the Bristol Poetry Festival, the Franschhoek Literary Festival, Spier and Poetry Africa. Her fiction appears in Chimurenga, Twist (Oshun, 2006), Cape Town Calling (Tafelberg, 2007) and Art South Africa (6.2, Dec 2007). Gabeba is also a scholar, and writes for the media. Details of her academic writing and her articles in Newsday, the Sunday Independent, Mail & Guardian, Oprah and Real Simple magazines can also be found on gabeba.com. |
| THE DREAM IN THE NEXT BODY contains poems written over five years, while the writer lived in Cape Town, Sheffield and a university town in Pennsylvania. The poems deal with moments of stillness, recognition, anguish and love, each specific yet resonating beyond the speaker, the place, the time. A HUNDRED SILENCES, Gabeba's third collection, explores the intimate terrain of love and loss, of beginnings and 'the beginning of leaving'. A speaker sees in 'the piles of things to give away' the sign of her father's death. A meditation on the house the speaker's grandfather built, one poem shows that 'the landscape is passing into language'. A hundred silences can be found at all good bookshops in South Africa, and is part of Homebru at Exclusive Books. A hundred silences is also available online at www.kalahari.net and www.exclusivebooks.com. In the US, A hundred silences is available from Webster's Bookstore; contact elaine@webstersbookstorecafe.com. |