2024-2025 Blakely Poetry Competition Winner: Sihle Ntuli

We are THRILLED to share that Diann Blakely Visiting Poet Vivek Narayanan has selected Sihle Ntuli's poem "Shade or The Revelation of All Our Neighbourhood Has Lost" as the winning poem for the 2024-2025 Diann Blakely Poetry Competition!

View The Blakely Archive 

Sihle Ntuli is a poet, classicist and editor from Durban, South Africa. He received his Master of Arts in Classical Civilizations from Rhodes University, where he briefly lectured Classics at the University of the Free State and the University of Johannesburg. His writing has been supported by the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies in South Africa and the Centre for Stories in Australia through the JIAS Fellowship & Patricia Kailis Fellowship respectively. He also served as the editor-in-chief of South Africa’s oldest literary magazine New Contrast in 2023. He is a 2024 Best of the Net poetry winner and a Pushcart prize nominee. His poems have appeared in ADDA stories, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks; Rumblin (uHlanga 2020) and The Nation (River Glass Books 2023) alongside two full length collections Stranger (Aerial Publishing 2015) and Zabalaza Republic (Botsotso Publishing 2023)

Sihle's name is pronounced with two syllables as See+Hle. You can follow him on Instagram: @sihlexntuli