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SA writer wins 'African Booker'
11/07/2006 07:00 - (SA)
London - A South African whose short story offered a child's view of life under apartheid has won this year's Caine Prize, organisers of the award for African writing said on Monday.
Mary Watson's Jungfrau explores family dynamics from the perspective of the young daughter of a committed teacher in late apartheid South Africa.
"It is a powerfully written narrative that works skilfully through a child's imagination to suggest a world of insights about familial and social relationships in the new South Africa," Nana Wilson-Tagoe, an expert on African literature at the University of London and chair of the Caine judges panel, said.
Jungfrau is part of a collection of stories the Cape Town-born Watson first wrote as her master's thesis at the University of Cape Town.
She now teaches film at the university and is working on her first novel.
Watson was the seventh winner of the £10 000 prize, sometimes dubbed the "African Booker" because of its link to the late Man Booker Prize chairperson Sir Michael Caine.
Previous winners include Helon Habila, who won in 2001 and went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize for a later novel.
The annual short story prize was created in honour of Caine, a British businessman with a deep interest in Africa who for almost 25 years chaired the management committee of the Booker, Britain's most prestigious literary award.
Four other writers had been shortlisted for this year's Caine Prize: US-based Nigerian Sefi Atta; South African Darrel Bristow-Bovey; Kenyan Muthoni Garland; and Moroccan Laila Lalami.
- AP
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South Africa
