Today on the podcast I’m talking with writer Arja Salafranca.

Arja Salafranca has published three collections of poetry, A Life Stripped of Illusions (1995), which received the Sanlam Award for poetry, The Fire in which we Burn (2000); and Beyond Touch(2015) which was a co-winner of the SALA Awards.

Her fiction has been published online, in anthologies and journals, and is collected in her debut collection, The Thin Line (2010), longlisted for the Wole Soyinka Award in 2012. She has participated in a number of writers’ conferences, edited two anthologies and has received awards for her poetry and fiction.

Her next book is a collection of creative non-fiction essays, travel writing, personal essays and journal entries, to be published by Modjaji in 2021. She lives in Johannesburg.

Arja’s piece in Living While Feminist is called Rafiya and it takes the form of a series of diary entries at the point where Arja embarks on her first lesbian relationship at fourty years old. In that piece she says: Sometimes what is not said, doesn’t exist.

We talk about the importance of writing through the good and bad times, the value of different forms, and the recent collection from Modjaji - Fools Gold.