Category: Surf literature

Debut Poetry Collection

~ Glen Thompson

The 1st September will see the launch of my debut poetry collection, In the Slowness of Melting published by Karavan Press (2026).

An Extract

Paddling
to what pleasure?
sporting hope in dying
waters

From the poem: "Paddle Action"

About the Collection

In the Slowness of Melting is a collection of lyric poems that echo the waves in form and reflect in content on surfing, the beach, the ocean and our planet. Moving between the past, present and future, the collection registers internal and external shifts of focus to foreground change and a sense of loss. It reflects on our social world and seeks a more utopian future in the face of our climate crisis. The book is eco-poetry – or rather, cli-poetry – infused with a surf goth aesthetic, presenting a sunburnt disposition while thinking with/in the Anthropocene.

The collection curates poems I have penned over a few decades, but mostly from the post-Covid-19 period. The poems provide me with a voice I am not able to include in my historical writing on surf culture – a poetics that offers a personal preface to my forthcoming non-fiction book. Many of these lyric poems historicise surfing or the beach and reflect on sea-level rise and climate change to frame a poetics of our planetary climate crisis.

The book launch event details are available from Karavan Press here. Image by Karavan Press.

Book launch: Interview with Melissa Volker on her novel Shadow Flicker

~ Glen Thompson

On 22 August 2019 I interviewed Melissa Volker about her eco-romance Shadow Flicker (Karavan Press, 2019) at Xpression on the Beach, Muizenberg. The novel is set in contemporary Cape St Francis, where the female protagonist returns to surfing. The novel addresses environmental issues relating to the development wind energy farms in the area.

This is one of few literary outputs in South Africa to foreground surfing within the novel’s plot and frame main characters as surfers (or where the authors are surfers themselves). I am aware of a handful of novels and short-stories in English which also do so, namely: Hagen Engler’s Life’s A Beach (1997) and Water Features (1998) (autobiographical fiction, short stories) and Robin Auld’s Tightlines (2000) (beat fiction), Byron Loker’s New Swell (2006) (autobiographical fiction, short stories), Mike Nicol’s Of Cops and Robbers (2013) (crime fiction), and Mary Duncan’s Surfing Sally (2010) (illustrated children’s fiction). Andy Mason’s (aka N.D. Mazin) The Legend of Blue Mamba (2013) (graphic novel) brings this literature into conversation with the world of underground comix.

I am aware of Afrikaans youth fiction too, specifically Mary-Ann van Rensburg’s ‘n Reënboog oor Grootbaai (1995) and Jeanette Morton’s Die Vlinder en die Surfer (2012).

There are also fictional short stories published in local surf magazines since the 1960s.

There is published poetry too that adds to the literature featuring surfing, for example, Robin Auld’s “Between the Storms” and “Reef” in his Kelp (2006) and Stephen Symons’ “Death of a Surfer” and “Muizenberg” in his Questions for the Sea (2016).

It may be time to start compiling an authoritative account of South African “surflit”. Inspiration for this can be drawn from the innovative work undertaken for the Waves of Fiction: Surfing in Australian Literature project led by scholar Rebecca Olive. The aim of the project is to be “able to follow the various threads of surfing that weave through Australian literature [that] will deepen our understanding of how surfing has shaped our relationships to beaches, coastlines and oceans, and how surfing has contributed to a sense of being Australian.”