/ 24 October 2003

Hugh Lewin awarded Olive Schreiner Prize

The English Academy of Southern Africa has announced that author Hugh Lewin has won the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize for best new work of prose published in 2001/2002 for his book Bandiet out of Jail (Random House).

The Olive Schreiner Prize dates back to 1964, and is South Africa’s most established award to recognize excellence in prose, poetry and drama. Previous prose winners include Antjie Krog, Zakes Mda, Deena Padayachee, Ivan Vladislavic, John Conyngham and Ahmed Essop, to name but a few.

“We received a gratifying number of submissions for this year’s award, all of which were of an extremely high standard. However, Bandiet out of Jail was our choice for winner. It is inimitably South African and a testimony to story telling as reflected in Olive Schreiner’s own notions of creativity,” said Prof Rosemary Gray, president of the English Academy.

Commenting on the award, Lewin said that he was delighted and very honoured to be associated with Schreiner in this way.

“This [award] will perhaps remind people that there were a small number of us – women and men – who also went to prison as a contribution to the struggle against apartheid, many of them, sadly, already gone, for example, Bram Fischer, John Laredo, Marius Schoon, John Matthews,” he said.

In her foreword to The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner observed: “Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method … [and there is] the method of life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away.

“When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls … no one is ready. Life may be painted according to each method, but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.”

Hugh Lewin weaves a tale of woe, at once serious and self reflexively satiric, sustaining the reader’s interest by skilfully synchronising both methods of telling.

“The text is divided into a number of equally compelling, overlapping sectors. The first records unemotionally but tellingly Lewin’s period of incarceration and was originally published as one of South Africa’s early prison diaries.

“Although the narrative records what were unequivocally seven lean years, the temporal, spatial aspects of confinement are superbly evoked; and the experiential elements of prison life are felt rather than told. The author draws the reader into the experience, intriguing, amazing and appalling by turn,” said the adjudicators.

They added that other equally compelling sections have been added to make this book a tour de force of gripping reading. One sector consists of a series of poems focusing on aspects of the author’s traumatic experience, unerringly demonstrating his creative instinct. Yet others deal with the death of Fischer and the creation of The Gleek, an underground prison newspaper.

The adjudicators also congratulated this year’s runners-up — Bloodlines by Elike Boehmer, Thirteen Cents by Sello Duiker and The Beneficiaries by Sarah Penny.