The Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal has announced internationally celebrated poet, dramatist, writer and sociologist Ari Sitas as the Featured Poet for the 29th edition of the Poetry Africa festival that will take place in Durban from 2 – 11 October 2025.
As we reflect and engage with this year’s Poetry Africa’s festival theme, “Poetry: An Architecture for Social Justice” we believe that Ari Sitas’s contributions as a dynamic cultural worker to the struggles against apartheid remains as resonantly loud and relevant in our continued quest to build an anti-apartheid society modelled on the values of social justice”, said Siphindile Hlongwa, the curator of the Poetry Africa festival.
Ari Sitas spent 27 years in Durban, where he played a leading role in anti-apartheid and transformation processes in the cultural, community and workspaces sectors. He relocated to Cape Town as a professor at the University of Cape Town.
Sitas grew up in colonial Cyprus during the island's independence struggles and bi-communal strife and matured in Johannesburg, where he received his undergraduate and post-graduate education at the University of the Witwatersrand. He received his PhD in 1984 under the supervision of Eddie and David Webster. Academics Eddie Webster and David Webster inspired generations of students with their vision and practice of critically engaged scholarship, not only in South Africa but across the world.
“One of the key roles of the Featured Poet programme at the Poetry Africa festival is to honour legendary South African poets and to create platforms for inter-generational dialogue. Presenting Ari Sitas as the 2025 Featured Poet, we have the opportunity not only to engage with him but also to be reminded about the incredible legacies of David Webster and Eddie Webster too”, said Siphindile Hlongwa.
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Ari Sitas’s was one of the founders of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, which combined the compositional and poetic crafts of AfroAsia. He directed the musical oratorio Must Gandhi Fall? at Cape Town’s Homecoming Centre of District Six. His work has been translated into several languages, including isiZulu, French, German, Greek, Turkish, Urdu and Hindi. Several of his poems have also been set to music.
His latest books are Maps of Sorrow(2023, with Sumangala Damodaran) on the movement of precolonial music in AfroAsia, Music Notebook (2023) published by Chimurenga and a new poetry collection, Surplus Values (his tenth poetry collection). His other works are Tropical Scars (1989), Songs, Shoeshine and Piano (1991) Slave Trades (2000) RDP Poems (2004) Around the World in 80 Days (2013) Rough Music (2014) Vespa Diaries (2018) Oratorio for Small Things that Fall (2020) and Mapping Gondwana (2022).
ABOUT THE POETRY AFRICA FESTIVAL:
The Poetry Africa festival is South Africa’s largest and longest-running annual gathering of poets. Presented as both an online and live festival, the festival features an array of South African poets alongside poets from the African continent and other parts of the globe in poetry readings, book launches, performances, critical engagements and workshops. In 2026, the Centre for Creative at the University of KwaZulu-Natal will present the 5th World Slam Poetry Competition, bringing to Durban poets from across 40 different nations from across the globe.