PEN SA Members Shine on 2019 Sunday Times Literary Awards Longlists

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

This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Alan Paton Award.

It was in 1989, as apartheid began to crumble, that the Sunday Times announced the new prize, saying: “It suggests both a tribute and a hope. The tribute is to Alan Paton, one of SA’s great sons, while the hope is that the prize will encourage writers in SA to pursue the same standards of excellence and commitment which Paton set for himself.” For three decades it has done just that.

The Alan Paton Award will 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”.

Everyone is Present by PEN SA member Terry Kurgan is in the running for the Alan Paton Award.

Books by PEN SA members in the running for the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize include:

• A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia
• Talion (Wrok) by Beyers de Vos
• Patagonia by Maya Fowler
• Under Glass by Claire Robertson
• Theo & Flora by Mark Winkler
• The Season of Glass by Rahla Xenopoulos

This is the 19th year of the Sunday Times fiction prize, named for Barry Ronge, the arts commentator who was one of the founders of our literary awards. The 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”.

Read more on Times Live.