Damon Galgut and Chris Marnewick Win the 2009 University of Johannesburg Prizes

May 29th, 2009 by Ben - Editor

Alert! BOOK SA has learned that Damon Galgut and Chris Marnewick are the winners of this year’s University of Johannesburg prizes for creative writing.

Galgut wins the R60 000 main prize for his latest work, The Impostor (published by Penguin), and Marnewick the R20 000 debut prize for Shepherds and Butchers (published by Umuzi).

Unlike other literary prizes in SA, the UJ awards are not genre-specific. In this case, however, both the winners’ books are novels, although Marnewick’s account of a death-penalty case is “stepped in the factual”. They were up against other works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry this year: click here for the shortlist.

The UJ prizes are awarded in both English and Afrikaans; Etienne van Heerden and Loftus Marais were announced as the Afrikaans winners earlier this month.

We’ll run official text from the UJ committee below, so keep checking back here for updates – and congratulations to the winners!

Update: here are some of the judges’ views (from UJ committee):

Complete list of judges: Ronit Frenkel, Craig MacKenzie, Karen Scherzinger, Thabo Tsehloane, Leon De Kock, Ashlee Neser and David Medalie.

Thabo Tsehloane says:
Damon Galgut The Impostor
This is a story of a man who struggles against the conformist, survivalist and herd mentality of his society. But his struggles do not earn him a heroic status as he is shown by the narrative to be dependent for a living on his conformist and successful brother’s generosity and later his friend. Through this mocked hero the narrative is also able to make a sharp and incisive critique of the materialist and self-serving norms and values of a post-apartheid society.
Chris Marnewick Shepherds and Butchers
An interesting fusion of fact and fiction, the interaction of the personal and the public and a lethal combination of law and politics which delivers an unforgettable story of a young white man fated to be hanged and the lawyer who chooses to defend his apparently ‘lost cause’. The author writes with authority of a participant emotionally close and deeply touched by the events without compromising his objectivity as an observer of wider and broader social trends of the precarious transitional era in South African politics.
Leon De Kock says:
The Impostor is a taut and highly readable novel, with Ian McEwan-type undertones of sinister goings on, and a fable-like sense of characters trapped in a story not of their own making. The main character displays stunted agency despite his artistic vanity. This is typical of Galgut’s work, in which human subjects are shown to be unaware of the gap between their self-projections and the webbed nature of their actual, trap-like circumstances. The main character’s immersion in a world well beyond his romantic musings as a ‘poet’, is excellently rendered. To be a poet in the pastoral/romantic mould in this land, Galgut’s novel implies, is to be out of kilter with real social dynamics, which turn on greed, agitation, betrayal, ceaseless desire, and the God of Mammon. The Impostor is an atmospherically loaded, stylised piece of fiction that commands admiration.
Shepherds and Butchers is a novel of great impact and revelatory power. It is a work which defies the strong trend in South African fiction of walking away from the politics and horrors of the ‘old’ South Africa. However, it bridges the newer writing – which is increasingly replete with detailed scenes of ‘criminal’ violence – with an older history in which socialised violence has always been a sickening staple diet. Marnewick’s dispassionate, forensic style of fact-accumulation is the perfect foil to the sheer horror of the hangings (and the social violence which led to the hangings) which his novel so terrifyingly describes. Shepherds and Butchers is an excellent courtroom drama, and a literary fable about the co-equivalence of violence on both sides of the line – the government’s rule-by-capital-punishment, and the extreme aggression shown by the ‘criminals’ themselves. The state is shown to be every bit as violent as the ‘criminals’ indicted and executed by a deeply malfeasant apartheid state.
David Medalie says:
Damon Galgut’s ‘The Impostor’ explores loops of complicity and attempts to avoid responsibility in the face of cynicism, exploitation and deception. The writing is as precise as the moral environment is murky.
Chris Marnewick’s ‘Shepherds and Butchers’ is a thoughtful and compelling novel about the death penalty in apartheid South Africa. The part of the narrative which describes an execution is, in its power and the stark horror of its evocation, simply unforgettable.

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