‘A remarkably powerful and passionate voice’ – THE MAIL & GUARDIAN

★A moving meditation on Mother/Daughter relationships by world renowned poet, Antjie Krog.
★Longlisted for the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Prize (2026)

In BLOOD’S INNER RHYME poet Antjie Krog returns to the landscape of her youth. The natural beauty and lolling fields of South Africa’s Freestate inspire and fill her with a great sense of connectedness to South Africa, its history, and its people. But Antjie is coming home to say goodbye to her ailing mother, Dot. Old and frail, and in many ways Antjie’s antithesis, Dot has always been, and still is, an emotional and intellectual force to be reckoned with. A successful writer in her own right, Dot embodies much of the Afrikaner psyche, a cultural group Antjie has battled to understand, and has battled against, her whole life. Feisty, razor-sharp, and funny, Dot puts her daughter through her paces. For the remainder of Dot’s life, Antjie’s visits, also the letters they exchange, track Dot’s final years. BLOOD’S INNER RHYME is an expression of love, mutual admiration, and insurmountable difference between two highly skilled writers. Beautifully written and incisive, it delves into South Africa’s Anglo-Boer war past, picks apart issues of land ownership, race, and then focusses its lens on interracial romantic relationships, for a long time illegal and taboo in the country.BLOOD’S INNER RHYME is a work of autofiction that corresponds with episodes from the author’s life, including intimidation and death threats by the far right. Above all, the book cuts deeply as it tracks our most primary relationship honestly and movingly, in the voice of one of the country’s most celebrated writers.

Antjie Krog was a radio journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, all the while writing extensively for newspapers and journals. She and her radio colleagues received the Pringle Award for excellence in journalism for their coverage of the Commission hearings, from which came the best known of her non-fiction books, COUNTRY OF MY SKULL. She has won major awards in almost all the genres in which she has worked: poetry, non-fiction and translation. She is known primarily a poet. and has received among others the Eugène Marais Prize, the Hertzog Prize, the FNB Prize, the Protea Prize, and, for non-fiction, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award and the Olive Schreiner Award. She is also a recipient of the Stockholm Award from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture and the Open Society Prize.