Author(s): Julia Blackburn

Culture | History | Africa | South Africa | Anthropology

In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa. She had long been fascinated by the indigenous group called the /Xam, who were brutally forced from their ancestral lands by European settlers in the nineteenth century. Facing extinction and the death of their language, several of the /Xam people related their stories to a European philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his English sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd. In 12,000 pages of notebooks, Lloyd and Bleek meticulously recorded their words - their dreams, memories, hopes, history and beliefs - creating an extraordinary archive of this now extinct people.Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. As the world is plunged into a bewildering new state, she immerses herself in the stories of the /Xam. The /Xam saw themselves as just one small part of the complexity of nature. Their belief system gave voice and dignity to everything that surrounded them, the dead and the living, birds and animals, the wind and the rain, the moon and the stars. All things were once people, they said - everything was speaking to you, if you only knew how to listen.This is a haunting book about loss, colonialism, nature, and about how we live in the world and what we leave behind. In mesmerising, deceptively simple and often profoundly beautiful prose, Blackburn conjures the voices of a silenced people, revealing the weight of their omission from our collective memory and our imaginations. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers.

Review: An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction. -- Olivia Laing, author of EVERYBODY
Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers... Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity and power. Again and again, as I read, I gasped at the intense relevance and importance, as well as the beauty of this book. -- Hugh Brody, author of THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN
A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution. -- William Atkins, author of EXILES
A fascinating, poetic response to our contemporary age. -- Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review *
[Blackburn's] wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a drily downbeat humour and a genius for serendipity... Blackburn doesn't give us answers. Instead she works a miracle. In this book dead people talk in a dead language, describing a culture and way of life which is also dead, and yet, thanks to...Blackburn's tactful, beautifully-framed extrapolations, those dead come before us and speak. -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * New Statesman *

Author Biography: Julia Blackburn has written ten books of non-fiction, the most recent of which, Time Song, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize. Her family memoir The Three of Us won the 2009 J.R. Ackerley Award, and her two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions, were both shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Suffolk and Italy.