Here are the winners of the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards in partnership with Exclusive Books
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Bulelwa Mabasa and CA Davids were announced winners of the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards, in proud partnership with Exclusive Books, during an in-person event at the Sunday Times’ HQ in Parktown, Johannesburg.
Mabasa won the non-fiction award for My Land Obsession: A Memoir (Picador Africa). Mabasa’s admirable book documents the writer-cum-lawyer’s life, those of her clients and others in attempting to regain what's theirs. The judges described My Land Obsession as “an engaging memoir. It’s inspirational, factual and relevant with many angles that define our past going back generations”.
The non-fiction award criteria asks that the winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.
Writer, medical doctor, philanthropist and chancellor of Wits University, Dr Judy Dlamini and Julian Rademeyer, award-winning investigative journalist and director of the Organised Crime Observatory for East and Southern Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, paneled the non-fiction award.
The winner for the fiction prize should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.
The judges remained the same as last year, with oil-field engineer turned banker turned writer, Ekow Duker once again chairing and joined by journalist and media consultant Kevin Ritchie and writer and political analyst Nomboniso Gasa.
Each winner will receive R100,000.
Our congratulations to both Mabasa and Davids.