The winners of the 2002 Sanlam Literary Award were announced during the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown last week. The award is for short stories.
In the published-story category, Ashraf Jamal won for The Shades, the title story of a new collection published by Brevitas. It was inspired by Jamal’s encounter with the darker side of life in KwaZulu-Natal, where he and his family have lived for a year. The text has, in the words of Stephen Gray, one of the judges, “enormous reach”. Jamal is a writer and lecturer at the University of Natal’s Pietermaritzburg campus.
Johannesburg actor/writer Renos Spanoudes took first prize in the unpublished category for Mercury, one of three stories rooted in the experience of a South African Greek. His other two stories shared the runner-up awards.
Both Gray and his fellow judge Tim Huisamen noted the increase in the numbers of unpublished scripts submitted for the award — nearly 500 as opposed to 80 published stories. This suggests, says Gray, that more South Africans are writing and fewer are being published.