Masande Ntshanga

thumb Masande Ntshanga (born 25 April 1986) is a South African novelist, short story writer, poet, editor and publisher.He is the author of two novels, The Reactive (2014), which was published in five territories and won a Betty Trask Award in 2018, and Triangulum (2019), for which he was nominated for a Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African.In 2020, Ntshanga released his third book, Native Life in the Third Millennium (2020), a collection of poetry and prose from his experimental press, Model See Media, which was also well received, with critics praising it for its themes and use of language.Ntshanga has delivered guest lectures at the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts in Cape Town,The Beeler Gallery in Columbus, The Columbus College of Arts and Design,The Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town,and The SAE Institute for Creative Media in Johannesburg.In 2020, he joined the Rhodes University MA in Creative Writing Program as a part-time lecturer and took over the literary journal, New Contrast, becoming its first black editor since the magazine was established in 1960.He now teaches at the Creative Writing Department at Wits University. Quotes I would say it differs from other publishers in that it’s experimental in essence. Not only are the books MDL SEE releases experimental in one capacity or the other, but the press itself is an experiment. For a short stint, I was an amateur hacker in high-school, and of late, I’ve come to think of MDL SEE more and more in those terms – as a form of hacking. For example, if publishing could be seen as an operating system and other presses as applications – either built by corporations or independent developers – then MDL SEE’s place would be that of the computer virus, the Trojan horse, a rogue program whose aim is to smuggle in subversive data to the mainframe. It’s a pop-up in the sense that it doesn’t have a schedule it adheres to. Instead, the device goes into hibernation until the right project and collaborator come along. Regarding the rest, our future projects are set to include the publication of visual art, code and other media. It was a thought experiment that turned practical during the idleness of the pandemic, and to execute it, I knew I would have to go smaller in scale, which is why I chose to work with chapbooks, soon discovering that they were the perfect combination of agile and potent. The idea was to create a playground for writers to express themselves in without any restraints, their concerns focused mainly on making a book that felt perfect to them. From the beginning, language has always been an important element, or consideration, for me when it comes to writing. Not only its application as prose—which will always be essential—but also which language to select as an instrument for a certain artistic expression; and the politics that inform that decision Having had no real hand in my own assimilation as a young South African born towards the end of apartheid, I’ve been placed on a path that aspires towards the latter, as championed by Chinua Achebe, although I both agree and hold a lot of reverence for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s opposing view as expounded on in his seminal text, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), after which he resolved to write in his native language English is also the language I’ve read the most in, where I’ve discovered the writers that have remained with me, including African writers, who have been instrumental in instructing me on its possibilities and limitations as both a linguistic and artistic technology I often feel as though our history is destined to be surprising in nature—to differentiate itself from what precedes it—and to do so increasingly, with more acceleration, as each epoch recedes into the past Six Questions with Masande Ngcali Ntshanga: On Post-Apartheid Literature, the Afrofuturist Novel, and Publishing in South Africa 19 June 2023 I think the term “market” is the problem with the publication market. The concept is restrictive in essence because of its focus on returns, and as a result, it works to ensure that only certain kinds of books get to see the light of day Publishing Experimental Literature | Interview with Masande Ntshanga 7 October 2024 I think some readers haven’t come to terms with the idea that recreational drug use can be included in a novel without the intention of making a moral point about substance use, but as an extension of the novel’s simulated reality, and in service of a greater theme I’ve never been able to adhere to tradition, I think, or at least I’ve never been able to do so with a recognizable amount of success or joy AN INTERVIEW WITH MASANDE NTSHANGA n.d I don’t mind using Science Fiction as an overall descriptor for the novel. To me, it feels like a nod to my adolescent years, where, for a while, it’s where I deposited and nurtured my imagination I’ve always found Science Fiction to be a form that’s irrevocably linked to critiques of power and societal structures Interview: Masande Ntshanga, Author of ‘Triangulum’ 4 July 2019 External links Category:Authors from South Africa Category:Poets from South Africa Category:1986 births Category:Living people