Young Bosman | Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies

Herman Charles Bosman

This title in the Anniversary Edition series is edited by Craig MacKenzie.

"I am still comparatively young, and yet I am going bald on top and I also have what is termed a scholarly stoop: if I was a liquor-seller and not a writer it would be known as a criminal slouch."

So wrote the youthful Herman Charles Bosman at the outset of what he called his career “in the writing line.”

Gathered here for the first time, an extensive set of Bosman’s early writings, ranging from the humorous squibs he wrote as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy for The Sunday Times through to his provocative, experimental short pieces of the 1930s on all of the unmentionables: incest, cannibalism, eroticism, blasphemy . . .

A large part of Young Bosman is previously uncollected, providing a fresh (and sometimes shocking) perspective on a writer all South Africans think they know. Included is Bosman’s sensational playscript, “Street-woman”, with the surviving novel he intended as a retrospect of his spirited apprenticeship.

With an introduction and several illustrations and photographs.