Call for entries: 2025 Sunday Times Literary Awards in partnership with Exclusive Books

This year we celebrate 35 years of the Sunday Times Literary Awards. Books are one of the vital pillars of the Sunday Times, and over the past three decades the awards have become synonymous with truth-telling, holding the powerful to account and books that transport us to the past, the future, known and unknown worlds, safe places, dangerous spaces, adventures and a mélange of emotions. 

Since their inception, the annual Sunday Times Literary Awards have become established as the most prestigious South African prizes for local works of nonfiction and fiction. We are fortunate and honoured to enter another year of prize-giving collaboration with Exclusive Books, who attach the same significance as the Sunday Times to the recognition of the power of the written word and wish to illuminate the outstanding work produced by our local authors.

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”.

From thought leaders to memoirists and authors who take sociopolitical risks, these accounts cast a light on who we are as a people. 

In 2001 the Sunday Times fiction prize was introduced, encouraging and recognising excellence in novels with stories that explore our multifaceted country in a multitude of ways, with the stipulation that the winning title should be one of “rare imagination and style ... a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction”.

Last year Andrew Brown took home the fiction prize for The Bitterness of Olives (Karavan Press).

The winner of the non-fiction award was Johnny Steinberg, for Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage. (Jonathan Ball Publishers).

This is a call for entries

Submissions are invited from publishers for the 2025 Sunday Times Literary Awards in partnership with Exclusive Books for non-fiction and fiction. 

• For submission rules and procedures, and to download 2025 entry forms, visit https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/books

• Click here for the submission rules and procedures for non-fiction.
• Click here for the submission rules and procedures for fiction. 

• The list of titles that publishers wish to enter should reach the conveners by email by Friday May 23 2025.

• Publishers are to provide any full-length fiction or non-fiction work relating to Southern Africa published between December 1, 2023 and December 1, 2024. 

• Publishers are requested to email a list of FOUR TITLES, per imprint. Please submit a list of other titles published that are eligible. 

• All entry forms must be sent to Mila de Villiers of the Sunday Times, at mila@book.co.za by no later than Friday May 23 2025.