Internationally celebrated poet, dramatist, writer and sociologist, Professor Ari Sitas, will be the Featured Poet for the 29th edition of the Poetry Africa festival.

The event is hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), and will take place in Durban from October 2 to 11.

Siphindile Hlongwa, the curator of the Poetry Africa festival, said Professor 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 (UCT).

“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 Ms Hlongwa.

Professor Sitas grew up in colonial Cyprus during the island’s independence struggles and bi-communal strife, said Ms Hlongwa. He received his undergraduate and post-graduate education at the University of the Witwatersrand. He received his PhD in 1984 under the supervision of Professors Eddie and David Webster. They 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 and Eddie Webster as well”, said Ms Hlongwa.

Professor Sitas 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, said Ms Hlongwa. 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. He also wrote the 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).