S8 E6 Jarred Thompson, Tyriek White & Khanya Mtshali: Debut Novels, Social Critique & Mortality

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The Empty Chair by PEN SA

PEN South Africa

63 episodes

3 days ago

In The Empty Chair Podcast: A Transatlantic Conversation, PEN South Africa hosts authors, academics and activists based in South Africa and the USA. The podcast focuses on books, writing, social justice, freedom of expression, shared histories and possible futures. Each of our episodes is dedicated to an imprisoned writer or a writer who has been harassed by the state.

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S8 E6 Jarred Thompson, Tyriek White & Khanya Mtshali: Debut Novels, Social Critique & Mortality

The Empty Chair by PEN SA

1 hour 15 minutes 6 seconds

2 years ago

S8 E6 Jarred Thompson, Tyriek White & Khanya Mtshali: Debut Novels, Social Critique & Mortality

Khanya Mtshali asks Jarred Thompson and Tyriek White about their novels The Institute for Creative Dying and We Are a Haunting. They share their experiences of publishing their first novels and muse about craft, literary influences, religion, death, transatlantic history and creative responses to infrastructural decay.

Khanya Mtshali is a writer and critic from Johannesburg. She has an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University and has been published in The New Yorker, Africa Is a Country, The Johannesburg Review of Books and other places. She is the author of It's Not Inside, It's On Top: Memorable Moments in South African Advertising (Tafelberg, 2021) and she has published an introduction to the book, Last Interview and Other Conversations: Billie Holiday (Melville House, 2019).

Jarred Thompson is a literary and cultural studies researcher and educator and works as a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pretoria. He was the winner of the 2020 Afritondo Prize and has been the recipient of several prestigious scholarships. His debut novel, The Institute for Creative Dying, is published through Picador Africa and Afritondo UK.

Tyriek Rashawn White is a writer, musician, and educator from Brooklyn. He is currently the media director of Lampblack Lit. He has received fellowships from Callaloo Writing Workshop and the New York State Writer's Institute, among other honours. He earned an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is the author of the novel, We Are a Haunting (Astra House, 2023).

In this episode we are in solidarity with detained Chinese writer and journalist Dong Yuyu. We call for his freedom. You can read more about his case here: https://www.pen-international.org/news/pen-international-joins-pen-centres-worldwide-in-call-for-release-of-chinese-writer-and-journalist-dong-yuyu.

As tributes to him, Tyriek reads from “On My Way out I Passed over You and the Verrazano Bridge” by Audre Lorde, Jarred reads “Still at War with the Stoics” by Jacques Coetzee and Khanya reads “Twenty Questions for your Mother” by Mahtem Shiferraw.

This podcast series is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to promote open conversation and highlight shared histories.