About the Archive
The idea of the archive is to present to new (and old) readers the most interesting reviews, interviews, and articles we could find for each book published by Deep South, to give a sense of the cultural, historical and literary contexts in which the book appeared.
Most of the reviews and interviews appeared in literary journals and newspapers not seen by readers, some of them not even seen by the writers themselves. We have included other material as well: performance videos, articles by the writer, academic articles, newspaper clippings, and reviews of the writer’s books not published by Deep South.
We obtained all these documents from the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature (formerly NELM) which has database lists and holdings on every author in the country. We then curated/selected the most substantial documents, and contacted all reviewers and interviewers for their permission. In many cases we created a PDF plain text of the document – either because there was no online source, or because the original document was not very legible.
In some cases, mainly academic articles, access is behind a paywall. We created PDFs for these documents alongside the link, so that they could be accessible to writers and students who cannot afford to pay. If you are a student or researcher registered with an institution or university which subscribes to online academic publishers, you should be able to access the article online. If you are an online publisher, we hope you will accept our inclusion of these PDFs out of consideration for the cultural and educational importance of the archive to its readers.
Warren Jeremy Rourke will be managing the archive and book sales.
For any queries or corrections (or praise) about the archive, write to
Warren Jeremy Rourke warren@deepsouth.co.za
with cc to Robert Berold r.berold@gmail.com
Please also feel free to put your comments on the Deep South Facebook page.
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Collecting and reproducing documents in the archive was much more work than we imagined. Our thanks are due to many people who helped:
– the National Arts Council (NAC) Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme (PESP4) for funding the six months of the project, including the web design and initial document research.
– the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, in particular senior curator Marike Beyers, for supplying all the databases and documents we needed, as well as doing much photocopying and scanning.
– Kyle Allan for reading through many reviews and articles and helping decide which documents to select.
– Sibongakonke Mama for carefully and systematically contacting authors in the early stages of the project and checking with them all the documents we wanted to use.
– Paula Ferreira of Blaze Media for her elegant site design, and for giving us many more hours than she originally quoted.
– Hetta Pieterse of Unisa Press, for essential advice on copyrights and for the wording of the permission requests.
– Mindy Stanford for transcribing many original documents into plain text PDFs and for her encouragement and support over the whole project.
After the first six months of the project the NAC grant had been spent, and three people joined, who were paid minimally or not at all for a lot of work. I cannot thank them enough, without them the archive would not have been completed:
– Mangaliso Buzani for cleaning up all scans and converting documents from printed pages to electronic texts.
– Danya Ristić-Schacherl for proofreading every electronic text that we generated with her unique meticulousness.
– Warren Jeremy Rourke who worked day and night, and the hours in between, to put the text and archive documents into website format, to create and test all links, draw up all permission letters, and provide useful advice on copyrights and internet protocols.
—– Robert Berold, publisher