Janice Warman, Deputy Chair of the Society, has had a poetry collection accepted for publication by award-winning publisher Fly on the Wall Press.
These Are the Things We Have Lost (to be published in January 2026) is a groundbreaking debut poetry collection by award-winning journalist and novelist Janice Warman. Exploring the complex landscape of apartheid-era South Africa through a feminist lens, this collection promises to be a powerful literary contribution to understanding personal and political memory.
These Are the Things We Have Lost, revisits a childhood spent under apartheid in South Africa while encompassing a rich tapestry of experiences and emotions. From the intimate moments of love and loss to reflections on war, motherhood, illness, and the fleeting beauty of everyday life, the collection explores identity, resilience, and belonging. With a journalist’s precision and a poet’s sensitivity, Warman captures both the personal and the universal, creating a testament to the enduring power of memory and words—a celebration of life’s joys and an elegy for what inevitably slips through our grasp.
Janice Warman comments: “Growing up in apartheid South Africa affected me profoundly; this world has fed into my work as a journalist, non-fiction and Young Adult writer, but has never penetrated more deeply than into my poetry. Being a feminist in a country that was inherently violent towards women, particularly black women – birthing and growing your own children and how that takes you back to your own childhood in that faraway place – grieving your mother while she is still alive and suffering with dementia thousands of miles away. Poetry is the means by which I write most deeply and passionately about my real life, the life that runs below my work life like an underground river. The things that demand that I take up my pen.”
https://flyonthewallpress.substack.com/p/will-your-book-travel-the-global
Good things come together – Janice also notes that a poem of hers has been picked as finalist in the current Mslexia competition.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 