Alive and kicking

KWELA publisher Annari Van der Merwe once said: "It is time for all of us to start listening to each other's stories, and South African publishers can play a vital role in giving authority to these voices. Only by listening to each other's stories can we understand each other and see how our stories overlap."

For this year's Fiction Award Van der Merwe has entered two distinctly different stories: Rayda Jacobs's Confessions of a Gambler and Links by Nuruddin Farah. The former lifts the veil, literally, on a seemingly devout Muslim woman in Cape Town who leads a double life as a compulsive gambler. Farah sets his story in war-wracked Mogadishu, a surreal Hades of eroded humanity.

And so the judges this year have ricocheted from Somalia to the smart suburbs of Johannesburg, from Kimberley to Cape casinos, travelled deep into Durban's Indian community, and out onto the plains of the Karoo.

One of the judges, Jenny Crwys-Williams says: "There are some genuinely exciting novels; new voices telling stories of communities which until very recently have been in the shadows."

Her fellow judge Andries Oliphant agrees. "South Africa literature is now, with great purpose, tilling the fields left fallow for decades. With the pressures once placed on local writing to impart information about injustices and stake out political positions spent, the texture of the writing is becoming richer."

Leading the field of entries are two books which have already won regional prizes in the Commonwealth Writers Prize: Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor (Penguin Viking) and Diane Awerbuck's Gardening at Night (Secker & Warburg). Galgut's chronically disturbing story, set in an unnamed homeland, has received wide critical acclaim and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction last year.

Awerbuck's audacious first novel is a trippy coming-of-age tale that unfolds in bleak Kimberley. Annelie Botes explores the mind of an autistic child - and the tragic effect on her family - in the moving Riddle Child (Penguin Viking). The child at the heart of Reviva Schermbrucker's Lucky Fish! (Jacana), is 13-year-old Stephen, the son of political prisoners in the 1960s. It is a tale of one family's journey of love and acceptance.

Both Willemien de Villiers and Patricia Schonstein employ food as a central theme in their novels. In De Villiers's Kitchen Casualties (Jacana) the smell of home-cooked meals - bredies and bread, risi e bisi - permeates a history of abuse and denial. Schonstein's Time Of Angels (Bantam) serves up the exquisite food of a community of Jews and Italians in Cape Town's Long Street, the fulcrum of the action being Pasquale Bevenuto's bar and delicatessen.

Food is equally important in the Indian community of Durban's Grey Street, the setting for Aziz Hassim's Lotus People (STE Publishers), but this richly idiomatic, epic tale chronicles the history as well as the personal and political struggles of this unique people.

To Johannesburg for Pamela Jooste's People like Ourselves (Doubleday), where previously - and generationally - advantaged characters grapple with the New South Africa. It is a brittle, peculiar world that is wealthy in every sense except morally.

Jo-Anne Richards's Johannesburg is a vivid city tumbling on but leaving some of its characters behind in Sad at the Edges (Stephan Phillips). From Gauteng to the Klein Karoo for Katy Bauer's debut novel The Track (Jacana); a quirky social comedy of small-town manners and mores.

Michiel Heyns established himself on the local literary scene with his first novel The Children's Day . In The Reluctant Passenger (Jonathan Ball), he turns an affectionate, witty eye on a group of characters in Cape Town. The plot, rampant with comedy, revolves around a carping environmental lawyer who takes on a case to save the baboons of Cape Point from developers' greed.

Marguerite Poland is one of this country's most elegant writers, and her latest book Recessional for Grace (Penguin Viking) is a showcase of this talent. It is an unusually erotic story about a young biographer who becomes beguiled by her subject, a long-dead academic.

Njabulo S Ndebele conflates fact and fiction, novel and biography in his powerful work The Cry of Winnie Mandela (David Philip). In the voices of four women he explores the "women who waited" - separated from their men by exile, migrant work, activism or infidelity.

Finally, and in a genre of its own, is Deon Meyer's pumping Heart of the Hunter (Hodder & Stoughton). Meyer is making a name for himself for slick, wholly South African thrillers that easily match those of his US and British counterparts.

Each of the judges on this year's panel have commented on how much wider the canvas has grown for South African writers. Phaswane Mpe says: "There are obvious, one could even say anticipated, concerns with the process of truth and conditions under which reconciliation might be possible... what one did not anticipate was the extent to which sexuality would frame much of post-apartheid narrative. Explorations of sex, desire, pleasure, disease and power are tackled."

"The books signal a new Out of Africa," says Crwys-Williams. "Words - many of them wonderful - being flung out on the continent for other people in different parts of the world to grab on to, to sample what it is like, in greater or smaller measure, to live on this rambunctious Southern tip."

And Oliphant maintains that "contemporary South African fiction in English is as good and sometimes better than anything on offer elsewhere. It deserves attentive reading."

Finally, it seems, we are getting to listen to each other's stories.

. The short list for the Fiction Award and the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction will be published next week. The winners will be announced at a gala dinner on June 26. Watch this space until then as we cover the hot contenders for South Africa's biggest book prizes.