(Column: The Pink Tongue, May 2008) Me and the gay men in my life, we have a lot in common. We sing along to 80s power ballads. We can identify the colour taupe. We don’t think it’s ridiculous to spend R280 on a bottle of shampoo. We have fraught relationships with our mothers. We like beautiful men. Most of the time, the rules are clear (“You be George Michael, I’ll be Aretha Franklin,” he says as the cheesy keyboard intro...

Feature: Horizons, January 2008 It is utterly still here. The sky is hard blue like pottery glaze. The skeletons of spring’s daisies – little papery discs on dessicated stems – stand stiffly between small, sharp, black stones. An invisible insect flies past, making a metallic whirring noise like a miniaturised helicopter. The sound stretches until it melts back into the hot silence. Nothing thrives here. Except us. Tankwa Town, a...

Foodie travel article: Weekend Argus, Travel supplement, 30 September 2007 The most memorable meal I had in France was one that we cooked from ingredients we gathered at the local market in St Menehould – a cassoulet made with the Champagne area’s famous Puy lentils, fresh leeks and tomatoes, and homemade parsley and pork sausages, washed down with Valmy, a fruity beer from the farm down the road. Ah, happy days. But luckily I don’t...

(Book design article: Design Indaba, 4th Quarter 2006) It may not be wise to judge a book by its cover, but we do. And if you’re browsing in one of South Africa’s bigger book stores, which stocks at least 30 000 individual titles, all roughly the same size and shape, a book’s cover can seem, well, all-important. Imagine a packed stadium full of teenage girls, each trying to get the attention of Robbie Williams. The competition...

Women in publishing article: Mail & Guardian, 21 April 2006 Half the titles on the Homebru list are by women. But, asks Michelle Matthews, what more can be done to make women’s voices heard? In a recent newspaper article, novelist Ian McEwan proclaimed: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.” He and his son had sorted through the McEwan bookshelves and found a number of duplicates of classic books. They gave away 30...

Women in publishing article: Mail & Guardian, 15 October 2004 “Sometimes you go into a bookshop and you see a shelf set aside just for women writers.” Sindiwe Magona is speaking at the launch of a book of essays on her work, collected by Siphokazi Koyana. The crowd of about 40 people is a mixture of academia, government and family; and a young Japanese man who has read Magona’s work in translation, a representative from O...