Justin Fox's Blog

1. THE CLIENT  One thing about being a private investigator, you’ve got to learn to go with your hunches. That’s why when a moegoe named Frikkie Wordsworth walked into my office and laid his cards on the table, I should have trusted the cold chill that shot up my spine.  ‘Baksteen?’ he said. ‘Baksteen van […]

A short story about poaching set in ZImbabwe. It was placed third in the 2006 PEN Short Story Competition, judged by JM Coetzee.

Jonglez Publishing, 2016 A captain who continued to live on the wreck of the Kakapo for three years, Table Mountain’s most exclusive hiking, a restaurant in a maximum security prison, the arboreal evidence of apartheid’s earliest manifestation, a woman disguised as a man for 56 years in order to be a doctor, a beach on […]

Umuzi, 2023 “Let us, then, set off together on a series of journeys around South Africa with an old kitbag full of books instead of maps to guide us. Let us follow meandering paths through the landscapes of literature, and celebrate how local authors, characters and readers are shaped and inspired by place …” In […]

Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2022 July to Oct 1941. Lieutenant Jack Pembroke is placed in command of a small, anti-submarine flotilla at the Royal Navy base of Simon’s Town. But he has precious little time to train his officers and men, and prepare his ships, for the arrival of the Nazi wolf packs – U-boats sent […]

“The Fox family tour of Europe in 1973 culminated in two months on the islands of Patmos and Santorini. We were joined by my sister and brother, who’d been studying and travelling abroad, as well as by various friends and family members who arrived by air, ship or donkey. For a child who’d fallen in […]

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Extract from my poem ‘Storm Berg’ in BEAT ROUTES (Karavan Press, 2021) … The final push along a fine-print track past skank-arm, gnarly-barked proteas to Jim’s Cave snug in heaven’s nape; dripping vines, the shy pitter-patter of falling water, jade-leafed curtains offer an enchanted rainbow dish cut by clean, slim-pillared water whose knives strike quartzite […]

… An overnight hut at Anysberg’s foot with jackals howling to the moon, a billion diamonds for your light. Naked swimming in the dam, your skin tricked by the dread of slippery water and its dark-tentacle unknowns. Vodacom syringes prick the sky, the non-aesthetics of connectivity on Prince Albert’s bleak umbilical… #BeatRoutes

My debut poetry collection, Beat Routes, has just been published by Karavan Press. Most are travel poems about journeys in Africa and beyond. This is an extract from the first poem in the collection, ‘N1’. #BeatRoutes N1 – CT to Jozi The great South African road reduced to a commuters’ run, boredom’s lonely groove from […]