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Antjie Krog was born and grew up in the Free State province of South Africa She became editor of the Afrikaans current-affairs magazine Die Suid-Afrikaan and later worked as a radio journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings 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 three non-fiction books, Country of My Skull She has won major awards in almost all the genres and media in which she has worked: poetry, non-fiction and translation But, mainly, she has lived as a poet Krog’s first volume of poetry was published when she was 17 years old and she has since released thirteen volumes, the most recent of which is Skinned (2013)   12 weeks 4 days sonar sound waves discovered to trace icebergs and hostile submarines a lifelong ago  locate you now and thousands of kilometres away on my computer screen I stare in perplexity at the microcosmic scrapings of light confirming your presence in a bone hollow you lie like a tiny pinned speckle part of the order of angels     a small dough-like crumple so light still that it could not bear any kind of name but beholding you with a mouthful of eyes I notice something     something inevitably humanlike in what transcribes as a minute head-and-body syllable pilfering light – a kind of inner bonelight – from the surrounding prune-dark universe which expands with its lung-effervescence chaos of sound and chemistry one knows the diminutive eye in the grainy skull-bag is eye but words stand transfixed at the little nose’s slice-clean fought-free grace-line    the exhausted earth is being set free by this   peace takes breath here is this a stump-fingered little hand    this silver piece beady as cauliflower? prrrrr says the late autumn white-face owlet kra calls the bushveld francolin boldly breath-ed the ventricles are being woven the dreaming cerebrum begins its consciousness of blue and yet it is as if I am staring at a drawing on a cave wall how had something, something I do not know myself but something of me pegged a miniscule claim in that delicate flake form that from our peculiarly (un)free-hammered fatherland I can say: that foreign fernlet there across the sea is