Email: Sindiswa.Busuku@uct.ac.za

Room: 127 A.C Jordan building

Biography

Sindiswa Busuku is a creative writer and a lecturer in the Department of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. She grew up in Durban. Having been awarded a doctoral scholarship by the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, she is currently reading for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. Her doctoral dissertation, And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, is an experimental work of poetic fiction that thinks through ideas of Black fugitivity, Black wandering, migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and the crisis of Black histories and futurities.

She has published various poems in local and international poetry journals. In 2016, she published her debut collection titled Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso) –  a cross-genre assemblage of photographs, prose and poetry experimenting with imagination, memory and documentation. She was awarded second place for the 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. Her work was shortlisted for the 2016 Gerald Kraak Award for African Writers and Artists, the 2016 University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing in English, and longlisted for the 2018 Humanities and Social Sciences Award. In addition, Loud and Yellow Laughter is the winner of the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry.

Her teaching and research blur creative and critical methods and writing genres to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical. Her current research focuses on ideas concerned with hybrid genres, the speculative imagination, archives, critical fabulations, and creative writing.

Research Interests

Creative Writing

South/African and International Poetry

Archives and Critical Fabulation

Hybrid Genres and Ergodic Literature

Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction, Surrealist Literature

The Body, Embodiment and Representation

Memory and Postmemory Studies

Human-non-Human Animal Studies

Editorship of Scholarly Journal

Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa

Social Responsibilities, Memberships, and Other Activities

Current

Co-organiser of The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Collective

Books

S. Busuku

And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness (manuscript in progress).

S. Busuku-Mathese

Loud and Yellow Laughter Botsotso Publishing, South Africa, 2016.

Literary Awards/ Achievements

2023

Winner of The Patricia Schonstein Poetry in McGregor Award for “After the Burning Years”

2018

Winner of The Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry for Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso 2016)

2018

Longlisted: The National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Creative Writing

2017

Shortlisted: The University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for South African Writing in English for Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso 2016)

2016

Shortlisted: Gerald Kraak Award for African Writers and Artists for “Midnight in Lusikisiki (Or The Ruin of The Gentle Women)”

2015

Second Prize: Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award for “Portrait of A Mother and Indiscretion”

Scholarships, Fellowships, Grants

2022

Recipient of Jakes Gerwel Writers Residency: Dialogue Programme for Writers from the Low Countries and South Africa.

2019

Recipient of a four-year Postdoctoral Creative Writing Fellowship Grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the University of Western Cape, South Africa. (Declined)

2016

Recipient of a three-year full-time residential Doctoral Scholarship from The National Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Articles

“In The Summerhouse Of The Mind: The Black Wandering Child, The Storyteller, and The Speculative Imagination.” (in progress)

Peer-Reviewed Articles/Writing

2023: In Conversation with CA Davids by Sindiswa Busuku and Dr Danyela Demir (UKZN) (submitted to Wasafiri)

2023: “After the Burning Years: Thinking Through Abandoned and Haunted Futures in the work of And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness”, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International (forthcoming)

2018: “Night”, Georgia State University, Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art, Vol. 19, no. 1, December

2015: “It’s not Personal, it’s just Business: Market or Artistic Value when Credentialing Creative Writing Graduates in South African Universities?” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 27 (2)

Published Interviews

An Interview with Andrew Tshabangu by Sindiswa Busuku. (forthcoming).

An Interview with Gabeba Baderoon by Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese. New Contrast: South African Literary Journal, 179, Vol. 45, Spring 2017.

An Interview with Fred Khumalo by Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese. New Contrast: South African Literary Journal, 178, Vol. 45, Winter 2017.

Adjudication and Editorial Work

2023

Judge for The National Poetry Prize organised by New Contrast: South African Literary Journal

2022

Judge for the second edition of Zine Space Competition organised by Norval Foundation, in collaboration with Dream Press

2020

Judge for Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry

2018

Guest Poetry Editor for the August Issue of The Single Story Foundation

2017 – 2018

Interviews Editor for New Contrast: South African Literary Journal

Literary Publications

S. Busuku

“Funerals”, Poetry In McGregor Anthology 2022

S. Busuku

“Midnight in Lusikisiki (Or The Ruin of The Gentle Women)”, Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poems of Decolonisation,  Ad Donker Publisher 2021.

S. Busuku

 “The Impaled Night Sky”, BKO Magazine 2020.

S. Busuku

“Visiting”, “The Used-Car Salesman”, Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying, Jonathan Ball 

Publishers 2019.

S. Busuku

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Visiting”, The Single Story Foundation, August 2018.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Portrait of A Mother and Indiscretion”, Illuminations: Special South African Issue. Issue 32, May 2017.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Funerals”, “Book of Chronicles”, “Visiting”, New Contrast: South African Literary Journal, 176, Vol. 44, Summer 2016.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Sheila: She Was A Friend Of Mine”, “Father: On Being A Husband”, New Contrast: South African Literary Journal. 173, Vol. 44, Autumn 2016.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Porcupine Man”, Aerodrome, October 2015.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Portrait of A Mother and Indiscretion”, Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology, 2015.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Mother’s Lyric (i)”, “Sobriety and Grief”, Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology, 2014.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Mother’s Lyric (i), Prufrock, Vol. 2, Issue 3, December 2014.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Mother’s Lyric (i) (ii) (iii)”, New Coin, Vol. 50, no. 2, December 2014.

S. Busuku-Mathese

“Stone Wall”, New Coin, Vol. 3 .51, no.1, December 2014.

Academic Papers Presented at Conferences

2023

Keynote Address “After the Burning Years: Fugitivity and Manoeuvring Through Cemeteries of Abandoned Futures”. Presented at Sol Plaatje University International Language Conference.  6-8 September

2023

Paper “After the Burning Years: Freedom, Fugitivity and Manoeuvring Through Cemeteries of Abandoned Futures”. Presented at On Abolition: A Symposium at Duke University. 2-3 February

2018

Paper “Towards a Feral Poetics of Humanimality”. Presented at The National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Annual National Doctoral Conference. 31 October - 1 November

2018

Paper “Speculative Fiction and Black Embodiments”. Presented at the University of Western Cape “Postgraduate Conference on Literature, Creative Writing, Media and Culture”. 22-23 May

2017

Paper “Music, Memory, Memorial: Thinking Through Music and Mourning in Selected Poems from Loud and Yellow Laughter”. Presented at Artistic Intersections as Tools of Resistance: Musical-Literary Crossovers in Contemporary South Africa Conference at the University of Johannesburg. 15-17 September

2017

Paper “Loud and Yellow Laughter:  Exploring Authorial Ethics and the Dynamics of Power”. Presented at Writing for Liberty Conference at the University of Western Cape. Organised by Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, UWC Creates, in collaboration with Lancaster University. 27-29 March

2016

Paper “Dark Matter: Exploring the Phenomenon of the Black South African Void in South African Speculative Fiction”. Presented at Struggles for Liberation in Contemporary Southern African Literatures and Cultures at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 10-11 November

2016

Roundtable panellist “Literary Apartheid and the Literary Imagination: Getting Under the Skin of South African Speculative Fiction”. Presented at the 17th Triennial ACLALS Conference at Stellenbosch University. 11-15 July

Keywords: creative writing, speculative fiction, memory and archive, human-non-human animal studies