Launched at The Book Lounge: 10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing

October 30th, 2009 by Liesl

A merry crowd gathered at The Book Lounge Wednesday night to celebrate the launch of 10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing, which Lounge proprietor Mervyn Sloman described as “a very interesting and important book”. Novelist Imraan Coovadia joined previous Caine Prize winners Mary Watson and Henrietta Rose-Innes to introduce their winning short stories, included in the book – Watson won the prize in 2006, Rose-Innes in 2008 – with his wry and fascinating insights into the form.

After reassuring the audience that he had absolutely nothing to add to the topic, Coovadia went on to say, “Short stories are what you write when have two or three interesting thoughts or even one interesting situation. Unlike novels, they privilege control and surprise – all the things you find in a poem.

“Sociologically, the same people who write short stories often write novels. They are parallel art forms; one is the minor form of the other. Novelists use short stories in quite practical ways, as an experiment when you’re looking for a new subject for a novel or you’re interested in finding out if some scene in a hotel works, for example.

“Sometimes you have just bits of ideas, and trimmings that you’ve accumulated in the course of writing a novel that you figure might go very nicely into a short story. I think short story writers often write novels to prove that they can. But they do have very different qualities.

“Once you’ve come into writing a short story, you seldom think about how long it is. It becomes a perfectly realized little thing. If you spent most of your time writing novels, you’re quite jealous of short stories writers, because novels aren’t so perfect. If you actually read a short story, you know there can be as much intensity in five or ten pages as there can be in a novel.

What worries Coovadia is how “ill-structured and out of control” the novel is by comparison. “A short story is a much more intense, concentrated phenomenon and it never has anything superfluous in it, whereas most things in novels are totally unnecessary. Most sub-plots have almost no reason to be there, and are introduced simply because you need to fill another 200 pages.”

Commenting on the interesting modulation between the forms, Coovadia noted that both authors were currently tending novels in progress. “Novelists,” he noted, “tend to think in terms of word counts. Like mothers comparing the weights of their babies.” Watson’s 85 000-worder currently outweighs Rose-Innes’, which clocked in at 44 953 words at the author’s last frantic count.

“Short stories have never been prominent on the South African literary scene,” said Coovadia – a point open to debate – “which has been a much more novel-oriented culture. The stories in this volume push the form to the furthest length they can. It’s exciting to see so much intellectual experimentation. The wonderful thing about the Caine Prize is that it elevates the short story almost in a way to be a vehicle for really ambitious unusual writing.”

Rose-Innes introduced the book and welcomed the “odd conjunction” of people who were able to attend. Mary Watson, who no longer lives in the city, was fortuitously in Cape Town, as was Nick Elam, the administrator and visionary behind the Caine Prize. Rose-Innes noted that the anthology included an “extraordinary contribution” from JM Coetzee, in the form of a new, previously unpublished short story.

She recalled a number of writers, South Africans amonst them, who had benefited from being on the shortlist, attending the workshop or the activities in London: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Petina Gappah, Uwem Akpan – who was last seen chatting to Oprah – as well as Alistair Morgan, Ken Barris and Nuruddin Farrah. “We all owe an enormous amount to the Caine Prize and to Nick’s tirelessness,” she said.

The authors entertained the gathering with various selections from their novels-in-progress.

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