THE RELUCTANT STORYTELLER

256pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2020

Winner of a 2021 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award.

 Foreword by Fred Khumalo.

Short stories.

"In his collection of short stories that are set in KwaZulu-Natal, Nakanjani Sibiya has a way of telling what looks like an ordinary story in an extraordinary, hypnotic and unflinching way that as a reader you cannot stop listening to the voices of his village characters. He dissects his characters with great passion, humour and compassion by using simplicity, dexterity and his familiarity with oral storytelling tradition of isiZulu folklore." Niq Mhlongo, author of Affluenza and Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree

 "Nakanjani Sibiya ... has for the first time made some of his stories available in English translation ...These are fully contemporaneous tales, related in awareness of what seems like almost every kind of issue, pressure and possibility of life in twenty-first-century South Africa ... Many of these tales have a Maupassant-like final twist of irony or poetic justice ... the stories connect through the humane understanding of the greed and need that permeate South African society. In this respect, Sibiya’s purportedly innocent ‘village tales’ astutely measure the state of the larger nation." Annie Gagiano, English Department, Stellenbosch University

Nakanjani G. Sibiya has authored, co-authored and edited more than fifty isiZulu literary works across genres. His debut novel, Kuxolelwa abanjani? won the 2003 MNet Book Prize as well as the BW Vilakazi Literary Award. In 2014, his play, Ngikuthand’ukhona lapho, won first prize in the Maskew Miller Longman Drama Awards. He is currently a lecturer in isiZulu at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.