2019 MEDIA24 BOOKS LITERARY PRIZES │ MEDIA24 BOEKE LITERêRE PRYSE 2019
Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English fiction (novels, short stories, drama)
Judges: Johan Jacobs, Molly Brown, Karl van Wyk
WINNER
Niq Mhlongo: Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (Kwela Books)
Niq Mhlongo’s collection of short stories, Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree, represents a superior kind of storytelling by a skilful storyteller. The stories are diverse, each one distinguished from the rest by way of subject matter, tone and narrative voice. Mhlongo has a quick ear for dialogue and idiom and the tales contain many ingenious and amusing similes and metaphors. The characters are confidently drawn, and the tales are full of life, vigour, sly wit and a subtle appreciation of human diversity and South African realities. These stories are not only cleverly constructed individually, often presenting unexpected shifts and surprises, but they are also imaginatively linked by their setting and various motifs, and composed and integrated into a cycle that figuratively maps Soweto. The stories all cohere in their attempt to challenge the reader with atypical conceptualisations of Soweto, even proposing that Soweto is an idea that lies beyond its geographical confines. In this collection, Mhlongo shows that Soweto is not only that place south-west of Johannesburg, but extends into white spaces as well and potentially even beyond national borders. Soweto becomes a state of mind, a cultural phenomenon, a way of being.
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SHORTLIST
Nozizwe Cynthia Jele: The Ones with Purpose (Kwela Books)
Nozizwe Cynthia Jele’s award-winning first novel, Happiness is a Four-Letter Word (2010), deals with three friends trying to find happiness while juggling multiple personal and professional roles. The Ones with Purpose (2018) is a much darker novel in that it explores the death from breast cancer of the narrator’s sister, Fikile. Yet the story is far from being simply didactic. Jele describes Fikile’s illness sensitively and unsentimentally, while also expanding out from that centre to explore alcoholism, poverty, sexual exploitation and a range of complex and entangled contemporary relationships. In doing so, she segues deftly between present and past, while holding the different strands of her plot together by means of the voice of the narrator, Anele, whose fears, hopes and complex responses to her family are consistently engaging and believable. Using a strikingly spare and unadorned style, Jele positions Fikile’s experiences within detailed and moving descriptions of family life and traditional rituals. Intriguingly, Fikile manages to retain a teasingly human unknowability, finally remaining something of a mystery even to Anele. Her illness and death thus become a path not just to despair and loss, but to the discovery of unexpected but very human complexity.
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Kirsten Miller: The Hum of the Sun (Kwela Books)
In 2006, Kirsten Miller offered insight into the minds of the autistic in her nonfiction work Children on the Bridge. She has again contributed to this subject, this time in a work of fiction, a novel, The Hum of the Sun (2018). The story begins with tragedy: Ash, an adolescent, and his autistic brother, Zuko, endure the deaths of their mother and young sister. Ash, not yet old enough to care for his brother, journeys with Zuko to Cape Town in search of their father. The odyssey is unforgiving, though their hardships are punctuated with moments of grace, often offered by the various characters along the way. Miller’s prose is lyrical and gentle, particularly in her rendering of the boys, one of whom possesses a mental and intellectual profile most readers cannot imagine. Part of Miller’s thoughtfulness is that she never allows her words to interrogate or make sense of Zuko, instead relying on the intelligence of her readers to discover for themselves the features of his mind and the completeness of his character. Miller is deft in her craft, and has produced a commanding fiction that offers immense care and consideration to both her characters and readers.
Lees ook
Soweto, under the apricot tree deur Niq Mhlongo: ’n resensie