“Walking, Falling is Kelwyn Sole’s seventh collection of poetry. With a wide variety of forms and tones, it extends and deepens themes that emerged in his earlier books: love and human relationships, the exposing of false and clichéd perspectives in our socio-political life, our relationship as South Africans to land and landscape.”
“Whether the theme is the end of a relationship or the murder of immigrants, there is the calm look of analysis, a voice, like a conscience, that threatens to disturb the reader’s complacency, but a voice simultaneously gentle with empathy and sincerity.” – Rustum Kozain
Author Bio
From the Deep South Website:
“Kelwyn Sole was born in Johannesburg and was educated there and in London. He worked in Botswana as a schoolteacher, in Namibia as an educationist and in Johannesburg for an anti-apartheid NGO, then taught for 30 years at the University of Cape Town, retiring as De Beers Professor of Literature in 2016.
Sole’s first collection, The Blood of Our Silence (1987), won the Olive Schreiner Prize, while Walking, Falling (2017) won the South African Literary Award (SALA) for Poetry. His eighth collection, Skin Rafts, was published in 2022 and was shortlisted for the NIHSS award. Individual poems have won the Thomas Pringle, Sydney Clouts and DALRO awards. His work has been widely anthologised both in South Africa and internationally.”
