Arja Salafranca

Contributor

Arja Salafranca is a South African writer and content creator for Now Novel. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Wits University (2012) and currently lives in Johannesburg.

Biography:

Her first poetry collection, A life stripped of illusions, received the 1994 Sanlam Award for poetry, while a short story, ‘Couple on the Beach’ received a Sanlam Award in 1999. Her second collection of poetry, The fire in which we burn, was published by Dye Hard Press in 2000. She received the 2009 Dalro Award for poetry. Her third poetry collection, Beyond touch, was a co-winner of the 2016 Sala Awards. Her debut collection of short stories, The Thin Line, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. It was long-listed for the Wole Soyinka Award in 2012.

She has edited three anthologies of prose most recently Fool’s Gold (2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Awards.

She edited the Life supplement in the Johannesburg-based The Sunday Independent from 2003 to 2016.

Her next publication is a collection of creative non-fiction to be published in 2024, consisting of memoir and travel stories.

Find out more:

Recent posts

Top blog posts for 2023

1. Writing productivity hacks The word ‘productivity’ sounds dry and technical, like something that belongs in a boardroom. Yet writing productivity – being able to create with the least possible stress and struggle – is what divides prolific from occasional authors. This post takes a look a...

December 17th, 2023

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Fate deals the cards: a review and interview with romance writer Romy Sommer

Like taking a trip to Italy Reading Romy Sommer’s seventh romance novel, My Fake Italian Marriage, is like taking a trip to Italy. It’s a novel richly redolent of the landscape, food, smells and sensibilities of Tuscany, around the hilltop medieval town of Montalcino. The novel is set on an ...

December 10th, 2023

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Making dialogue sound natural

Whether you’re writing a novel or a short story, you are going to want to make your dialogue natural and true to real life, as it’s spoken in the real world. How do you go about achieving this, when ‘natural dialogue’ can be boring to read if you write it verbatim? As to why you should make y...

December 3rd, 2023

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Self-editing after NaNoWriMo

Self-editing is a vital part of any writing process. Having completed a write-a-thon such as NaNoWriMo, you may have a shiny new manuscript on your hands if you’ve gone the distance. Now you need to start self-editing your manuscript. You might want to call in a professional editor at some point...

November 27th, 2023

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Writing my novel with the Now Novel process

In the following months I'll be blogging about my own novel writing journey using the Now Novel process, from the highs to the lows, and how I manage to navigate them. For years, I have lived with the bare bones of a story I want to set partly on a resort in the North West part of South Afr...

November 12th, 2023

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Baring your soul: ways to write a memoir

We live in a time when baring your soul by writing a memoir has become so popular that bookshelves, literal and virtual, are awash with the genre. And importantly, they stock memoirs of ordinary people. There was a time when it was more common for only the very well-known to write memoirs. We re...

November 5th, 2023

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