The cover for Zukiswa Wanner’s new book Hardly Working published by Black Letter Media, the South African’s first entry into the travel/memoir genre, has been unveiled.
Zukiswa Wanner burst onto the South African literary scene when her novel The Madams was published in 2006. The novel turned the concept of the madam on its head as it featured Thandi, a sassy black (African) woman, who decides to hire a maid to help her in the home. The sting in the tail is that the maid she hired is a white woman. The revolutionary concept announced a new voice in the South African scene at the time.
Since that debut, she has established herself as one of the most hardworking writers in the business producing three more novels in Behind Every Successful Man (2008), Men of The South (2010) and London Cape Town Joburg (2014). For Men of The South she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth best book Africa in 2011 and for London Cape Town Joburg she won the K Sello Duiker Prize at the South Africa Literary Awards in 2015.
The author has experimented with other writing genres writing children’s books in Jama Loves Bananas (2013) and Refilwe (2014) an African retelling of the of the fairy tale Rapunzel. The author also dabbled in nonfiction with the 8115: A Prisoner’s Home with Alf Kumalo (2010) and Maid in SA: 30 Ways to Leave Your Madam (2015).
The author’s latest offering Hardly Working is as a memoir/travelogue which gives a slice of the life of an author. We follow her as she travels to South Africa from Nairobi, Kenya by bus through Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe with her family. She then gives us insights from her period as a Fellow in Denmark where she would travel across Europe by road again ending up in Lviv, Ukraine.
The new book is set to be unveiled at ceremonies in towns and cities across the continent starting later this month in Nairobi.
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