Crooked Seeds has been longlisted for both the Women’s Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize of 2025

‘I defy anyone to read this and not come away feeling altered.’

– Byrony Gordon, Women’s Prize Judging Panel 2025

About the book:

Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home…

In a Cape Town where water is rationed and has to be collected from trucks each day, with the consequences of apartheid and the ending of it still evident, Deidre lives from day to day in squalor – largely created by herself – borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyone she knows. Then she is contacted by the police, and taken by a respectful constable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in a shattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she has to accept the truth of her past, and of her older brother, her parents’ golden boy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it truly is to be a victim.

About the author:

KAREN JENNINGS is a South African author. Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. Her memoir, Travels with my Father, was published in 2016, and in 2018 she released her debut poetry collection, Space Inhabited by Echoes. Her novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize of 2021.

While living in Brazil, Karen completed post-doctoral research at the Federal University of Goiás on the historical relationship between science and literature, with a focus on eusocial insects. Karen now lectures in Creative Writing at North West University. She was given the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award, and won the Africa Region Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition.  Karen co-founded The Island Prize for unpublished African authors, and co-wrote the Clamshell Press Workbook, a writer’s manual aimed at debut African authors.

Karen works with the mentorship programmes run by Writivism and Short Story Day Africa, both of which promote writing in Africa. Her interests lie in colonialism, historically and in the lasting impact that it has had on the continent of Africa and beyond. She is particularly concerned with the quiet lives of the everyday people who have been mostly forgotten by the politicians, big businesses and the rest of the world. In this way, she strives to give the ordinary a voice that can be heard and appreciated.