Literary Award Winners

South African literature was recognised and praised at this year’s Sunday Times Literary Awards held at the stylish Summer Place, Hyde Park, Johannesburg on Saturday, August 1. In a Different Time by Peter Harris claimed the prestigious Alan Paton Award for non fiction to mark the 20th anniversary of the prize, while Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson was honoured with this year’s Fiction Prize. The two authors received R75 000 each for their wins.

In a Different Time
In a Different Time tells the story of four young South Africans who embark on a mission that will ultimately take them to Death Row. They are a highly trained and experienced assassination squad reporting directly to Chris Hani. The narrative details their infiltration into the country, their operations, arrest and subsequent trial. These men are the foot soldiers who sacrificed everything. As their trial unfolds with their attorney fighting to save them from the gallows, so too does the story of their own lives and the choices they make. The story is set in a South Africa gripped by unrest and political tension, when the ANC was in exile and repression at its height.

Peter Harris was born in Durban, and grew up in Eastern Cape, and was educated at Michaelhouse, Rhodes and Warwick (UK). He practised law at JNB Bar for 15 years and was legal counsel to Cosatu. Involved in Peace Accord in the early 90s. Head of Monitoring Directorate of IEC in 1994.

"Many people have said that what they enjoyed about the book was that it made them remember a time of hope and ideals and horror and heroism, a time they had forgotten in a kind of cultural amnesia. I didn’t want to write a protest book about protest politics. I wanted to make it a book about ordinary people who ended up doing some horrible things; I wanted to understand what drove them to that point without casting judgment," says Harris.

The Rowing Lesson
Pregnant with her first child, Betsy Klein is summoned from her home in New York to her father’s hospital bed in Cape Town. Once caregiver and physician to a whole community, her father is now slowly slipping to the other side. As Betsy sits and waits for him to stir from his coma, she is compelled to imagine what his life had been like as a young Jewish man, surrounded by farmers on the South African platteland, only a decade since the Second World War. The Rowing Lesson is an utterly convincing and vivid portrait of one man’s life, and also that of a daughter, recapturing the dreams and longings of a father and husband.

Anne Landsman was born and raised in Worcester in the Western Cape and received degrees from the University of Cape Town and Columbia University. Her first novel, The Devil's Chimney, which was nominated for four awards including the M-Net Prize. She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

"In a lesser writer’s hands, this kind of shifting narrative could be problematic, but through the fluidity and sheer inventiveness of her prose, Landsman pulls it off… You finish The Rowing Lesson feeling as if you too have lived through Harold’s last hours. It has the surreal, visceral quality of a life flashing before the eyes – a final montage of an ordinary existence, made extraordinary through the power of imagination." -Irish Times, Catherine

Both books are available from Exclusive Books