PEN SA Members Make Big Impressions on the 2018 Sunday Times Literary Awards Longlists

Congratulations to the very many PEN members whose books made the longlists of the Sunday Times Literary Awards – the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize and the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award.

Books or books translated by PEN SA members on the 2018 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize longlist include: Selling LipService, by Tammy Baikie; Dikeledi, by Achmat Dangor; Accident, by Dawn Garisch; I am Pandarus, by Michiel Heyns; Dancing the Death Drill, by Fred Khumalo; Asylum, by Marcus Low; The Camp Whore, by Francois Smith, translated by Dominique Botha; Spire, by Fiona Snyckers; and The Shallows, by Ingrid Winterbach, translated by Michiel Heyns.

The Barry Ronge Fiction Prize criteria stipulate that the winning novel should be one of ‘rare imagination and style … a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction’.

Last year’s winner was PEN SA member Zakes Mda, for his novel Little Suns.

The Alan Paton Award for Non-fiction criteria stipulate that the prize should be bestowed on a book that presents ‘the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power’, and that demonstrates ‘compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity’.

Books by PEN SA members (and Board Members) on the 2018 Alan Paton Award longlist include: 65 Years of Friendship, by George Bizos; Get Up! Stand Up! Personal Journeys Toward Social Justice, by Mark Heywood; A Simple Man: Kasrils And The Zuma Enigma, by Ronnie Kasrils; Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years, by Nelson Mandela and Mandla Langa; and Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home, by Sisonke Msimang.

The shortlists for both prizes will be announced in May.

The full longlists may be found here, at the Johannesburg Review of Books.