Commonwealth winners for 2004
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The 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award for the Africa region has been awarded to Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor. The Best First Book Award has been awarded to Diane Awerbuck’s Gardening at Night. Each wins £1,000.
The Africa Panel of the Commonwealth Writers Prize considered fiction written in English from Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana, Tanzania and South Africa.
The two titles are carried forward to the final stage of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, which will be decided in Melbourne, Australia in May 2004. They join books in each category, selected by the three other international juries, covering Canada and the Caribbean; Eurasia; and South East Asia and the South Pacific. £10,000 will then be awarded to the Overall Best Book, and £3,000 to the Best First Book.
The judges for the Africa region are Andries Oliphant, a professor in theory of literature at the University of South Africa, Kofi Awoonor, a professor at the University of Ghana, and George Odera Outa, from the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
Gardening at Night was described as: "a narrative with acute observations [which] breaks out from the precocious story of what sounded like the account of a child prodigy. It matures beautifully through the agonizing years of puberty and a movement from the throes of white poverty and dysfunctional home conditions.
"Profoundly introspective, it explores the evolving consciousness of a girl moving through jolting episodes in early life in a troubled and disintegrating environment. Her journey from childhood through growing sexuality and toward womanhood is the discovery of a larger world and of the self."
On The Good Doctor, the judges said: "Deploying a handful of characters, it deals with some deep layers from the immediate history of South Africa which are still active in the present.
"Galgut’s figures are faced with the simplest choices from a multiplicity of personal opportunities: some forced on them by professional requirements in a changing society and some opted for from the force of personal circumstances. In this time of transition, expectation and apprehension are uneasily twinned in a story that sails close the undercurrents of passion and the desire to make meaningful contributions to a new dispensation deformed by the past.
"In prose, bristling with tension and subliminal reflections, Galgut dissects the cruel corpse of the past weighing on the living as they grapple to give meaning to their lives. In this tussle between disillusionment and idealism, the story is a series of sudden shifts between the known and the unknown. It unsettles every comfortable notion of change."
Previous African winners in the Commonwealth Writers Prize include: Ben Okri (Nigeria), Charles Mungoshi (Zimbabwe), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria), MG Vassanji (Kenya), Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Zakes Mda (South Africa), Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe), J.M Coetzee. (South Africa), Margaret Ogola (Kenya), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Manu Herbstein (Ghana), André Brink (South Africa) and Helon Habila (Nigeria).
