Finuala Dowling on tour

07 Sep 2018
07 Sep 2018

Finuala Dowling, Senior Lecturer in CHED's Centre for Extra-Mural Studies (EMS), has published a new book of poetry, Pretend you don't know me: new and selected poems. She will be launching the book in a series of readings at literary festivals in the UK in October. 
"Pretend You Don’t Know Me brings together in one volume the best of Finuala Dowling’s funny, poignant and idiosyncratic poetry from four earlier prize-winning collections, with a section devoted to new poems. It introduces this popular South African poet to a UK audience.Finuala Dowling’s debut collection, I flying, published in 2002, was an instant success in her native South Africa. Its accessibility, humanity and wit, as well as its beguilingly honest stories of home, parenthood, love, loss and desperation, won many new converts to poetry. The volume went into multiple printings, and won the Ingrid Jonker prize. Dowling’s subsequent collections, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe and Notes from the Dementia Ward (winners of the SANLAM and Olive Schreiner prizes respectively), consolidated her reputation as an inventive sketcher of the domestic sublime. Her chapbook, Change is possible, sold out at the 2014 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival." (http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/pretend-you-don-t-know-me-1189)