Editor's letter: Learn how to fall
Before you learn how to fly, you first have to learn how to fall. Paul Simon documents that mood and journey in his 1973 song Learn How to Fall.
'You got to drift in the breeze before you set your sails,' the US singer belts out. This issue marks my 10-year work anniversary, a period characterised by remarkable storytelling and profound personal growth. Having to crawl before learning to walk has been the biggest lesson.
When taking a trip down memory lane, my mother enjoys reminding me of my delayed motor skills; apparently, as a toddler I walked a little later than my peers. Mama, today I confidently take my first step, more confident and less clumsy.
'You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step,' Martin Luther King Jr. famously said. So, what does this mature and rhythmic gait look like? Allow me to brag for a second! An exclusive tête-à-tête in April with Italian fashion mogul Renzo Rosso, founder of Diesel and president of OTB — the parent group of Diesel, Jil Sander, Marni, Maison Margiela, and Viktor&Rolf — in his luxury suite at The Silo Hotel in Cape Town certainly ranks high.
Our chat (read about it on sowetanlive.co.za/s-mag/) put the spotlight on the brilliance of fashion superlatives Martin Margiela, John Galliano, David LaChapelle, and Glenn Martens.
A month later, I was on a virtual call, having a heart-to-heart with creative geniuses Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter, the duo behind Dutch label Botter (read about it on the next page). Throughout the video call, I was low-key screaming, kicking, and punching the air. But I stayed cool as a cucumber and kept my poker face on.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Citizen
10 hours ago
- The Citizen
Lowveld baker takes on The Taste Master SA
Chevonne Fourie, a passionate upcoming baker is competing in the sixth season of The Taste Master SA cooking competition. The show is already airing on SABC 2 and is presented and judged by the renowned chef, Zola Nene. Each episode has a new baking or cooking challenge, which gets judged by a rotating panel. These include Nene's mother, Chef Anwar Abdullatief, as well as Daniel Blignaut, Nathan Clarke, Justin Barker and other guest judges. ALSO READ: Mbombela boy bakes banana bread for trip to the seaside With two challenge wins to her name, Fourie has already proved herself a force to be reckoned with. She won the judges over with a mouth-watering orange and poppy seed cake in the Mother's Day challenge, and followed it up with a winning mushroom fagottini – an Italian-inspired stuffed pasta dish. All her recipes can be found on The Taste Master SA's website for viewers and foodies to try out. Fourie grew up in the Lowveld and began cooking and baking with her grandmother at just five years old in their family-owned hotel, the Böhm Zeederberg Country House in Hazyview. 'I remember preparing snacks for the guests with my grandmother in the kitchen and enjoying the new things I learnt from her,' Fourie shared. She also learnt to cook in her mother's restaurant, the Bohemian Groove Cafe, situated in her hometown, Kaapsehoop. She was a learner of Hoërskool Nelspruit and competed in a few cooking competitions. In Grade 11 she won her first cooking competition, 'Skole Kook' in Mpumalanga with her team in 2017. ALSO READ: No-Bake Macadamia Millionaire bar After finishing school, she was awarded a scholarship at the Capital Hotel School in Pretoria and pursued her dreams of becoming a pastry chef. She has her own patisserie called Botter is Liefde, where she makes custom cakes and pastries. Through The Taste Master SA competition, she hopes to improve her cooking skills and expand her network in the culinary industry. 'Of course winning would be the icing on the cake, but I'm here for the experience,' Fourie admitted. Viewers can watch new episodes every Tuesday at 19:30 on SABC 2. Missed an episode? Catch up on The Taste Master SA's YouTube channel and follow the journey to the next winner. At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading! Stay in the know. Download the Caxton Local News Network App Stay in the know. Download the Caxton Local News Network App here
The Citizen
14 hours ago
- The Citizen
Jan Van Goyen to strike again
Impressive debut winner to demonstrate his feature race potential Jan van Goyen was one of the lesser-known Dutch masters who painted during the 17th century. He was best known for landscapes in which some two-thirds of the painting was devoted to sky, producing a remarkable mixture of colour and white clouds. While he might not be as well known as the likes of Rembrandt and Jan van Eyck, based on the first run, his equine namesake has the potential to bring that name to the forefront of horseracing followers. Trained by Mike and Mathew de Kock, Jan Van Goyen could hardly have been more impressive when justifying betting support to make a winning introduction over 1160m at Turffontein on 3 June. The two-year-old son of Master Of My Fate was backed in from an opening of 7-1 to go off at the 3-1 and never looked like getting beaten as he romped to a 4.50-kength victory over Chapbook. Jan Van Goyen makes a quick reappearance at Turffontein on Sunday in Race 2, a Juvenile Plate over 1160m again, and there will have to be something special in that line-up to lower his colours. The fact that he will be running again so soon suggests two things. The first is that he took his last run well and the second is that a visit or two to Hollywoodbets Greyville for the two upcoming juvenile feature races — the Grade 2 Golden Horseshoe over 1400m on the Hollywoodbets Durban July card and the Grade 1 Premiers Champion Stakes over 1600m on 27 July – is likely. While two-year-olds do not get an official merit rating, the handicappers do keep unofficial ratings, and the debut performance of Jan Van Goyen was enough to get him a rating of 96. Callan Murray rode him on debut and he will be back in the irons on Sunday. Sean Tarry sends out Shadowfax in the same race and this grey son of One World ran reasonably well on debut. There is an old axiom which states that it's not how you start, but how you finish that applies to this colt. ALSO READ: Future Swing to cement his Durban July berth Also competing over 1160m at Turffontein, he was not in the race until the closing stages when he flew up last to finish a 1.50-length second behind Victory In Orleans. He returned with a scalp wound which could not have helped his cause but his time of 22.2 seconds for the final 400m is quite incredible. Shadowfax went off at 10-1 that day but that will not be the case this time and he stands out as the major threat to Jan Van Goyen and is the runner with whom to take Exactas. It is also worth noting that Richard Fourie has been engaged to ride him this time. Mike and Adam Azzie-trained Claw, a lightly raced and maturing son of Horizon, was rewarded for his consistency with a deserved last-start success and returns to the scene of that victory four weeks ago in Race 8, a MR 100 Handicap over 1600m. The four-year-old gelding was given a confident ride by reigning champion apprentice Kobeli Lihaba when winning over the same course and distance last time, and a subsequent three-point rise for that workmanlike success seems rather lenient, so should not halt the Azzie runner's winning momentum. There was a lot to like about the manner in which two-year-old filly Versace Onthetrack won last time. The former, a grey daughter of Danon Platina, confirmed the promise of her debut second by winning next time out over 1000m at the same venue and a step up to 1160m in the opener should unlock further improvement. She could provide bettors with some value in Race 1. NOW READ: Underworld plots a Durban July heist
Daily Maverick
a day ago
- Daily Maverick
Women's prize for fiction 2025: Six experts review the shortlisted novels
There are stories about family, sex, history, death and fundamentalism. From a longlist of 16, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2025 Women's prize for fiction. Our experts review the finalists (the announcement of the winner will be today, on 12 June 2025). The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden The Safekeep, a novel about the expropriation and theft of Jewish property during and after the second world war, revisits a dark chapter of Dutch history. When Holland fell to Nazi Germany, many Dutch Jews were deported to the death camps and were stripped of their homes and belongings. Van der Wouden's debut novel shines alight on the act of keeping or maintaining things left behind that were to be reclaimed by their rightful owners, but which were lost or stolen in the war. The trauma of this history hangs over the lives of three siblings grieving the loss of their mother in 1961. Isabel, the novel's lonely protagonist, lives alone in the family house, keeping it in order as her late mother would have wanted. All the while she suspects that their maid is stealing from the kitchen. But following the arrival of her brother's girlfriend, Eva, Isabel discovers the truth of the house and attempts to right historical wrongs. By Manjeet Ridon, Associate Dean International, Arts, Design and Humanities Good Girl by Aria Aber Aria Aber's debut is a frequently poetic and powerful künstlerroman (a novel that maps the development of an artist). It follows Nila, a young Afghan woman in Berlin, as she tries to escape from her own cultural heritage and that of the German city in which she lives. For much of the novel, Nila moves through the margins of society, from her family home in a brutalist rundown apartment block in the neighbourhood of Neukölln to a seemingly endless cycle of underground clubs, parties and festivals. She pushes away her family, her childhood friends, and her college education to pursue an alternative creative life and a destructive love affair. Ultimately though, Nila realises that her artistic work and a truly independent life can only be forged through her reconciliation with the past. Set against the real far-right violence of the 2000s, Aber makes clear how social inequalities and racial prejudices effect artistic access and creativity. She also acutely captures the tensions between freedom and tradition as experienced by bicultural Muslim women grappling with the expectation to be 'good girls'. All Fours by Miranda July 'Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,' remarks one of the characters in Miranda July's latest work of fiction. This story takes sexuality as its subject along with its relationship with creativity and ageing – or more specifically, the midlife plunge from a cliff that is female menopause. Like the author, July's nameless protagonist is 45, a successful artist, and married with a non-binary child. This auto-fiction puts the author's erotic nonconformity at the centre of the frame. Our heroine embarks on a road-trip to New York, but only 20 minutes from her home she falls in love with a young man. The pair spend two weeks together in a motel pursuing a mutual obsession, which ultimately remains unconsummated. This experience upends her life and she rebounds into turbulent adventures in sex, discovering a new sense of self. Perhaps it could have been a little tighter than its 322 pages – but then again, it's a work that explores a capacious road to excess. All Fours is a funny, honest, rambunctious tale Elizabeth Kuti, Professor in the Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji 'Do they think we were just some refugees?' Shirin, one of the characters in The Persians, asks her niece Bita. 'Weren't we?' Bita replies. The question of what a refugee looks like and what kind of stories they are expected to tell is a central theme in Mahloudji's raucous, poignant novel. The story shifts back and forward in time, from Tehran in the 1940s to Los Angeles in the Reagan years, and to both America and Iran in the 2000s, interweaving the voices of five women from the wealthy and powerful Valiat family. Mahloudji explores love, miscommunication, loyalties and betrayal across generations as well as between those who left and those who stayed behind. Jewellery is a central theme in the novel: glistening in shops, hidden in suitcases or flung away in protest. It represents both the adornment of female identity and the weight of the history that the migrants carry with them. Alexandra Peat, Lecturer in English and Director of the MA in Literature and Publishing Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout Tell Me Everything is the tenth novel in Elizabeth Strout's well-known series that sketches the lives of ordinary, yet complex characters, who enter and exit each other's lives in the nowhere town of Crosby, Maine. The three main figures in this latest instalment are 90-year-old retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge (recognisable from Frances McDormand's realisation in the award-winning TV series by the same name), middle age fiction writer Lucy Barton, and 65-year-old lawyer Bob Burgess. Loosely, this novel can be described as a murder mystery, though the plot twist of an alleged matricide, and Burgess's decision to defend the case, are secondary to the three main characters' process of sharing previously untold accounts of forbidden, traumatic, guilty and unrequited love. It is this telling and memorialising that produces the emotional core of the novel. If sharing their past gives the ageing storytellers some respite from the burden of their hidden lives, it is not in the kind that comforts with meaning and purpose. In Strout's novel, this relief is unavailable and is replaced with the more ephemeral solace of simply being heard. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis At the heart of Fundamentally is the affinity that forms between narrator Nadia, appointed by the United Nations to rehabilitate 'Isis brides' in Iraq, and one of her subjects, Sara, an east Londoner on the cusp of adulthood. They connect through a shared love of rollerblading, Dairy Milk and X-Men, as well as their caustic sense of humour. But the two British Muslim women have followed vastly different routes – Nadia to academia and the UN and Sara to a detention camp in Ninewah. Nadia's story of her journey through the vagaries of the humanitarian sector, punctuated by flashbacks to her failed relationship with first love Rosy and fraught relationship with her mother, is told with a compelling mix of verve and vulnerability. It raises hard ethical and political questions along the way. But it is Nadia's mission to help Sara that gives the novel its emotional complexity and depth, drawing the reader in while denying us any easy answers. Rehana Ahmed, Reader in Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature. DM This story first appeared in The Conversation. Manjeet Ridon is a Associate Dean International, Arts, Design and Humanities. Éadaoin Agnew is a Senior lecturer in English literature. Elizabeth Kuti is a Professor in the Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies. Alexandra Peat is a Lecturer in English and Director of the MA in Literature and Publishing. Yianna Liatsos is a Associate Professor in the School of English Irish and Communication. Rehana Ahmed is a Reader in Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature.
