Rémy Ngamije is set to release a new body of work titled Only Stars Know The Meaning Of Space. Presented as a literary mixtape, the collection of short stories has two sides.
The A-Side, read as one narrative, tells the story of a soon-to-be thirty-year-old aspiring writer navigating a complicated world of grief and loss. The B-Side, taken as a separate experience, features (seemingly) independent and unrelated short stories. However, when read together in the arrangement provided in this collection, a third world emerges—a complex, intergenerational, and interconnected world exploring attraction and love, dispossession and loss, migration and belonging, loneliness and isolation, all built around a gaping void: grief.
Rather than attempting to cross this black hole directly, the collection carefully traces around its edges, revealing the enormity and gravitational pull of this cosmic force. Mirroring mixtapes produced by rappers in the 90s, Only Stars is suffused with fierce and artistic energy, and, like a rapper on borrowed studio time, desperate to have its voice and stories heard, it commences the narrative on its dedication page and concludes it in the acknowledgements. Every aspect of the short form—title, language, punctuation, arrangement and presentation, and even the table of contents—provides beats and bars to ensure the reader, whether perusing one story in a quiet moment of reflection or burying oneself in the whole collection from cover to cover, is given a reading experience with the literary heft of a novel.
Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian author, editor, publisher, photographer, literary educator, and entrepreneur. His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One was first published in South Africa by Blackbird Books and is available worldwide from Scout Press (S&S). In 2022 the book was honoured with a Special Mention at the inaugural Grand Prix Pan Africain De Litterature and won the inaugural African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora.
Rémy He won the Africa Regional Prize of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was shortlisted for the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and 2020. He was longlisted and shortlisted for the 2020 and 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prizes respectively. In 2019 he was shortlisted for Best Original Fiction by Stack Magazines.
Rémy is the founder and chairperson of Doek, an independent arts organisation in Namibia supporting the literary arts and the editor-in-chief of Doek! Literary Magazine, Namibia’s first and only literary magazine. He is also the founder and director of several literary initiatives such as the Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards, the Doek Literary Festival, and the Doek Anthology. He has served as a judge of the Kalemba, Kendeka, and Commonwealth short story prizes. He is represented by Cecile Barendsma of the Cecile B Literary Agency.
Only Stars Know The Meaning Of Space, his collection of award-winning fiction, will be published in December 2024 by Scout Press (S&S).
Bongiwe T. Maphosa
Bongiwe Maphosa is a budding author with a passion for storytelling. With her thought-provoking narratives, she takes her readers on a literary adventure. Bongiwe's works on the human condition from a fresh perspective have earned her recognition and publications in the Avbob Poetry Anthology of 2019, The Writer's Club of South Africa 2021, and JAY Lit in 2021. She hopes to cement her place in the literary community.
