Queer Lit Salon

A new literary event celebrating queer writing and the joy of reading 

Join us for a day of queer storytelling, love, poetry, and knowledge.

Welcome Mandla Lishiva, author of Boy on the Run, moderates a series of discussions about everything from sex to academia.

Schedule

12pm

Queer Storytelling

Lawrence Mashiyane, Arja Salafranca, Jarred Thompson

 

1pm

Queer love

Jamil F Khan, Theophillus Afrotist, Uvile Ximba

 

2:30pm

Queer poetry

3:30pm

Unsilencing queer knowledge

Siya Khumalo, Barbara Adair, Thenjiwe Mswane

4:15pm

Sundowners

Check out our authors books. Avoid the queue -- order online and collect on the day.

Lawrence Mashiyane is a genderless male-bodied writer in love with the art of the short story. Interested, more than anything, in experiences he explores in writing. He is also an aspiring academic currently doing an MA in Applied Linguistics in which he endeavors to study homophobic language/discourse in South Africa.

IG: @lawrencemashiyane 

Jamil F. Khan is a critical scholar, researcher and the author of Khamr: Makings of a Waterslams which won the 2021 HSS Best Biography award and the UJ Debut Prize for South African writing in English. Their work aims to contribute to an archive of lives and experiences that are often ignored. 

IG: @jamilfarouk

Arja Salafranca has published three collections of poetry, one of which received the Sanlam Award. Her fiction has been published in local and international journals and anthologies, as well as online. Her debut collection of short fiction, The Thin Line, was published in 2010. She has also edited anthologies of short Fiction and poetry, one of which she edited with poet, Alan Findlay. She is the recipient of multiple poetry and fiction awards and in 2010 she was shortlisted for the Thomas Pringle Award for a short story. Most recently she has been longlisted for the 2016 Sol Plaatje EU Awards and Short Story Day Africa 2016 anthology. Beyond Touch was the co-winner in the poetry category of the South African Literary Awards in 2016. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Wits University.and was the arts and lifestyle editor on The Sunday Independent until 2016. Her next book is a collection of creative non-fiction essays, travel writing, personal essays and journal entries, to be published by Modjaji in 2023.

Visit her website or on Instagram @arjasalafranca

Siya Khumalo writes about religion, politics and sex. He is the author of ‘You Have To Be Gay To Know God’ (Kwela Books, 2018), which won the Desmond Tutu-Gerrit Brand Literary Prize. He is ex-military, a Mr. Gay World 2015 Top 10 Finalist and a 2022 Mandela-Washington Fellow. Follow him on @SiyaTheWriter (Insta and Twitter), or like his Facebook page ‘With Siya Khumalo’.

Barbara Adair is a writer with published experience in fiction - novels and short stories, travel articles, book reviews and academic articles. She writes, and also works part time at the Wits writing centre ,and in Lamu, Kenya, teaching and assisting students in critical thinking.She previously practised as an attorney litigating on human rights issues, and thereafter taught at the Wits School of Public and Development Management. In 2005 she published In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot which was Short listed for the Sunday Times Fiction award. Some of her other titles have been shortlisted for the African Regional Commonwealth Prize, as well as longlisted for the NIHSS literary award, 2020, and the Sunday Times Fiction award. She has had articles published in multiple newspapers and magazines and has had her short stories published in Queer Africa – New and Collected Fiction: A collection of Southern African short stories, among many other award-winning anthologies.

IG: @8924.barbara 

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 the runner-up in the 2021 Dream Foundry Prize. He has been the recipient of several prestigious scholarships, including The Global Excellence and Stature Scholarship, The Chris Van Wyk Creative Writing Scholarship, two National Arts Council Grants and an NRF nGAP scholarship. His debut novel, The Institute for Creative Dying, is published through Picador Africa and Afritondo UK.

IG: @poetic_impulse

Theophillus Afrotist is a licensed and certified Life Coach, currently practicing as a Personal Development Coach, Facilitator, Author and Speaker. She puts her work out into the world with an intention of contributing to the evolution of human consciousness, particularly in the black and the queer communities. She is the founder and spiritual director of Neo Healing Institut, a spiritual community that facilitates growth, enlightenment and a higher vision for humanity and a platform through which her workshops and retreats are hosted. She authored VOYAGE TO SELF, a guide to spiritual growth, enlightenment and evolution that was published in December of 2021. She regularly hosts and facilitates Queerhood Circle Evenings in Johannesburg, where Queer people gather to awaken. to learn. to heal, to release and to commune to find solutions on how to navigate the world as a Queer person in spaces that constantly spread the misleading and false notion that being Queer is unnatural and unAfrican

IG- @t_afrotist

Uvile Ximba is a creator, maker of things. She completed her Bachelor of Arts Honours in Politics and International Relations and Dramatic Arts; her Honours thesis was on creative approaches as dialogue for LGBTQIA+ Intimate Partner Violence. Her debut novel, Dreaming In Colour tells the story of Langa, a young woman navigating relationships, self, and memory. It is Langa’s story of coming out to herself, of discerning the history behind the closed door of conscious memory.

When it comes to her creativity, she prioritises interdisciplinary praxis, multisensory experience, and flow. In another life, Uvile was a cat. And she is currently obsessively questioning how oranges live and die.

Thenjiwe Mswane holds a Masters in Anthropology. She is currently doing a PhD with SWOP (Society, Work and Politics Institute) at Wits University. Mswane is an experienced Gender Researcher, and a retired Queer Activist. All Gomorrahs are the Same is her debut novel.

Welcome Mandla Lishivha was born 1991.

He is a freelance journalist and PhD candidate in Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria. He has a Master of Arts in Journalism and Media Studies, a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Anthropology and a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies & Anthropology.

Welcome worked as a travel writer for Getaway magazine for three years. He has written for the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Daily Maverick, Mail & Guardian, Reuters, GQ and City Press, where he served as the Arts and Lifestyle Co-Editor.