Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Bloody Parchment anthology has a home!


eKhaya, the digital imprint of Random House Struik, is delighted to announce the publication of Bloody Parchment: Inferna and other stories.

Bloody Parchment is the literary component of the annual South African HorrorFest held in Cape Town, South Africa, each October. The Bloody Parchment short story competition was established in 2010. Edited by prolific Cape Town writer and editor Nerine Dorman, Inferna and other stories is the collection of the winning story from the 2011 edition, Inferna by Christina Vincent, runners-up by Brett Bruton and Jenny Robson, and finalists by Mico Pisanti, Lee Mather, Stacey Larner, Toby Bennett, SL Schmitz, Benjamin Knox, Austin Malone and Joan De La Haye. The authors of the collection represent a fine international mix of writers from South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, Botswana and Australia.

With the success of films like District 9 and Lauren Beukes’s novel Zoo City, the burgeoning South African genre scene is coming to hungry international attention. eKhaya believes that the Bloody Parchment short story competition is the ideal hothouse to nurture new international genre voices and to encourage cross-pollination between emerging South African and overseas talent, and ultimately develop and encourage indigenous horror stories that appeal to a broad international market.

Bloody Parchment: Inferna and other stories is the sort of cutting-edge book eKhaya is looking to publish in its savvy, electronic format and we look forward to a productive association with the South African HorrorFest.

Bloody Parchment: Inferna and other stories will be released on 1 June 2012 at a recommended retail price of just R70. It will be available as a PDF and ePUB from South African online retailers Kalahari.net and Exclus1ves.com, and from Amazon.com internationally.