THE SMELL OF BLOOD & OTHER STORIES

123pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2024

A short story cycle that grew out of a years-long conversation between Caitlin Stobie and Kharys Ateh Laue about feminism, power, and narrative positioning. The stories follow the lives of mothers, daughters, schoolgirls, and sisters soon after the 1994 democratic elections, tracing their coming of age as women in post-apartheid South Africa.

Caitlin Stobie's writing has won the Douglas Livingstone Creative Writing Competition, the Heather Drummond Memorial Prize for Poetry, and an Authors’ Foundation Award. She is the author of the poetry collection Thin Slices and the non-fiction work, Abortion Ecologies in South African fiction: transforming reproductive agency. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leeds.

Kharys Ateh Laue is a writer and editor based in Cape Town. An Associate Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, she is the author of Sketches.