Prize books explore closed societies
Authors Andrew Harding and Marguerite Poland were announced the winners of the 2021 Sunday Times Literary Awards on Wednesday.
Harding won the nonfiction award for his investigative masterpiece These Are Not Gentle People (Picador). The foreign correspondent presents a layered true story of the brutal beating and death of two young men and how that crime in a small Free State farming town tore the community apart.
Poland took the fiction prize for her poignant and searing tale A Sin of Omission (Penguin Fiction). The novel is set in the Eastern Cape in the late 1800s and it follows the story of a black South African Anglican deacon, Stephen (Malusie) Mzamane, trained in England but marooned in a rundown mission in Fort Beaufort.
He battles the prejudices of colonial society and the church when he is called to his mother’s rural home to inform her of his elder brother’s death.
Both books reveal the racism in our society and scrutinise the heartache, barbarity and horridness it causes.
We learn about atrocities of the past in A Sin of Omission and understand a bit of the complexities of the community that fell apart in Harding’s book. Both authors hope their books keep the stories alive.
Harding, 54, said from London — where he is producing a BBC documentary on Jacob Zuma — that he is pleased by the award.
“To get a prize as big and as massive as this will hopefully give the book more oomph by driving new readers to it and keep that story alive.”
Poland, 71, who took our call from her study where she heard the news on Wednesday evening, is utterly thrilled but had not thought that her book had any chance of winning. “An old lady writing about missionaries is not your sort of average popular fare. But truly, I felt an enormous amount of gratitude. The journey I went on to write this book was long, it was difficult in many ways, but I had the most incredible support from people who knew about the subject or knew little bits of information.
“Most important is that I feel I share this with Stephen, my main character, who really did live and who had been forgotten. That community knows about him now and that to me is somehow very much a shared thing.”
Each winner will receive R100,000. Harding said: “I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how I would use the award because I have been acutely aware of the terrible tragedy in Parys and that there has not been a chance for the community to pull together, to learn and to understand what happened.
“I think that’s one of the frustrations of the actual sentencing [which took place last week]. It feels, in a very simplistic way, ‘well, so nobody murdered these two young men, and no-one can be held responsible’. Therefore what do you do with that fact and how do you help to heal the community?
“There doesn’t seem there’s much opportunity presented at the end and I do understand the complexities in this case and why the judge made the decision she did. It’s one of those many frustrations with trials and sentences and how rarely they seem to offer something that a community can build on.”
Poland said: “The lovely thing about the award is that I hope the book will be read by many. I think it’s a part of history that has been up until now not told, even though I think there has been incredible academic work done on that period, but there’s many stories that haven’t been written. I hope that this will encourage other people to look at that legacy and look at that history.”