SLAVE TRADES, and an artists notebook

190pp., paperback, Grahamstown, 2000

The long poem Slave Trades expresses the voice of the French poet Rimbaud who in 1874, aged 20, abandoned poetry and eventually settled in Ethiopia, where he became a trader in coffee, guns and hides, and toyed with the idea of trading in slaves.

An Artist's Notebook is a work of fiction set in a war-ravaged Ethiopia in the 1990s. A group of disaffected people, some of them descendants of the characters in Slave Trades, are trying to figure out their identities.

Sociologist, novelist, poet, playwright and cultural activist Ari Sitas was born in 1952 in Cyprus. A founder member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, he won the 1978 Olive Schreiner Award for his play, Randlords and Rotgut. His collections of poetry include Tropical Scars, The RDP Poems, The Vesper Diaries and Rough Music, selected poems. 1989-2013. He is also the author of The Flight of the Gwala-Gwala Bird, a collection of essays. He is currently Professor and Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town.