[4][5] In 2020, Ntshanga released his third book, Native Life in the Third Millennium (2020), a collection of poetry and prose from his experimental press, Model See Media,[6] which was also well received, with critics praising it for its themes and use of language.

[26][27] He completed a BA in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies, before enrolling for the university's MA in Creative Writing program, working under the Mellon Mays Foundation.

In his final year at the university, while working on his thesis,[29] Ntshanga wrote the short story "Space", which won the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013.

Following three Cape Town friends as they get high and sell antiretroviral drugs on the black market, the novel was positively received, praised for the beauty of its language despite its "harrowing" subject matter.

[35][36] Reviewing the US edition for Slate, Marian Ryan described the novel as what would happen "if Judd Apatow directed Jesus' Son and set it in Cape Town...The Reactive often teems with a beauty that seems to carry on in front of its glue-huffing wasters despite themselves.

Mixing science-fiction with philosophy and South African history, the multi-layered, multi-genre novel, with references ranging from the Ciskei Bantustan to Stanisław Lem and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, was positively received.

"[42] In The Sunday Times, referring to the novel's setting of early 2000s South Africa, Kavish Chetty wrote: "Ntshanga exhumes a generational experience that might otherwise have disappeared altogether, leaving behind only our unreliable memories to provide testimony of another epoch in the life of this country."

"[45] For OkayAfrica, Rofhiwa Maneta wrote: "Ntshanga's swirling prose poses philosophical questions about what it means to be alive, the different mechanisms we use to keep the heaviness of being at a remove, and how the freight of our colonial past reaches into the future.