For 25 years (and counting!), the Pontas Agency has been pushing African literature to all the corners of the world. We are proud to have been representing African literature since the very beginning, and to keep discovering highly interesting African authors from different cultures and living in many different cities worldwide.
ZP Dala is one of the most striking voices from South Africa. Her second novel The Architecture of Loss is coming out in the US with Pegasus Books in July 2017, and French rights have already been acquired by Éditions de l'Aube. Evoking the days of the anti-apartheid struggle in Durban and the high life of South Africa's Cape Town, The Architecture of Loss is a story of forgiveness and reconciliation that shines light on the dark underbelly of South Africa’s fight for freedom and democracy.
British-Congolese JJ Bola's is another fresh and new exciting voice to watch. His debut novel No Place to Call Home is out in the UK in June 2017 with OWN IT! Skyhorse Publications will also release their North American edition either later this year or early next. With a vivid cast of characters and luminous prose, and shifting between London, Brussels and the Congo, No Place to Call Home is a debut about belonging, identity and immigration, of hope and hopelessness, of loss and, by no means the least, of love.
Kopano Matlwa is one of the 25 African writers you should read, according to AALBC (The African American Literature Book Club). Her third novel, Period Pain, was published to great acclaim in South Africa by Jacana Media. In July 2017, Sceptre Books is publishing in the UK with the title Evening Primrose, in a highly-awaited and important launch. Translation rights have already been acquired by btb Verlag/Random House (German), Bompiani (Italian), Czarna Owca (Poland) and Catedral (Spanish and Catalan).
‘The slim Evening Primrose tackles more than many books twice its length. Evening Primose’s turns of emotion are virtuosic. The novel dances from satire to slapstick to stabbing pain to tentative hope. Matlwa’s voice is one we need.’ Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
South African IMPAC nominee Imraan Coovadia's new novel A Spy in Time (or The Pendulum Particle) could become the African time travel novel everyone was waiting for. His South African steady publisher Umuzi/Penguin Random House has already committed to publish it and we're currently closing the details of this deal.Imraan Coovadia's new and exciting novel could be pitched as a mind-beding literary Interstellar or Blade Runner from an African perspective. A very interesting addition to the growing eclectic South African dystopian scene in recent years.
