South Africa’s highly regarded M-Net Literary Awards gathered the best of the old guard and some exiting new talent in Cape Town last night.
In its 16th year, the M-Net Literary Awards serve to acknowledge and celebrate the exceptional riches in indigenous prose.
Mandla Langa, acclaimed author and patron of the M-NET Literary Awards, said the evening left most with the “distinct recent impression that there has been a tremendous increase in the quality of our prose”.
Last night winners were announced in four categories: Afrikaans, English, Sotho and Nguni.
The standard of the English entries was exceptionally high and the eventual winner’s work encapsulated the mood of the awards evening, held at the plush Pigalle Restaurant in the Mother City.
For his range of contemporary South African preoccupations – with the dynamics and repression of memory, with the relation between trauma and identity, and with the intersection of individual, familial and national history – the M-Net Award in the English category for 2007 was awarded to Shaun Johnson for his novel, The Native Commissioner (Penguin Publishers).
The winner of the Sotho kategorie was awarded to Kabelo Duncan Kgatea for Ntshware ka letsogo (Tafelberg: Sepedi).
Thelma Tshesane, one of the judges from the University of the Witwatersrand, said “in almost all the novels in the category there is an indication of poverty, oppression, the violation of human rights and insensitivity to other people’s plight.”
The judges found that Kgatea achieved the best book, depicting such harsh events.
The winner in the Nguni category is Kula Siphatheleni for his novel, Elowo Nalawo (Illitha Publishers: isiXhosa).
Innocentia Mhlabi, a judge from the University of the Witwatersrand, commented: “The general trend of most narratives explored aspects of poverty, abusive relationships particularly within the family, despair, hope and revival of morals and traditional values. The changing cultural values of African contemporary society were also taken into consideration.”
The Sotho and Nguni winners found, the judges argued, the most creative way of exploring these changing values.
In the Afrikaans category Ingrid Winterbach received the award for best Afrikaans prose for her astounding work, Die boek van toeval en toeverlaat (Human & Rousseau). Judges commended Winterbach for her clever way of balancing the sublime and the banal, the cosmic and the intimately personally in this subversive story which has enriched the genre of the Afrikaans novel.
Langa concluded after the glittering evening that the thirst for writing among South Africa’s scribes seems “as vibrant as the hope for a renaissance of our country and continent”.
