The winners of the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards have been announced.
Jonny Steinberg won the Sunday Times Non-fiction Award for Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, and Andrew Brown was awarded the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for The Bitterness of Olives.
The winners were announced at The Melrose Gallery in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg.
The awards celebrate ‘the best of South African non-fiction and fiction’ from the previous year. Each winner receives R100,000, marking the award as one of the richest literary prizes on the continent.
This year marks the 34rd anniversary of the non-fiction award, and the 23nd year of the fiction prize.
For the non-fiction award, the criteria is: ‘The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.’ The judges this year were Kevin Ritchie, Sewela Langeni and Hlonipha Mokoena.
The judges said of Winnie and Nelson:
Telling the tale of a statesman as storied as Nelson Mandela is difficult, combining it with the story of another icon in his wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, is remarkably ambitious and fraught with peril. Steinberg does it with skill, courage and sensitivity.
For the fiction prize, the criteria is: ‘The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.’ The judges this year were Siphiwo Mahala, Alma-Nelisha Cele and Michele Magwood.
Judges called the The Bitterness of Olives:
[a] harrowing account of a moment of strife, beautifully told. The author, endowed with vivid imagination coupled with acumen and erudition, deftly immerses the reader in a brutal and bewildering landscape. A wholly sublime narrative, this novel is contemporaneous, daring, complex and aesthetically pleasing.
