The 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards Fiction longlist

The 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards longlists have been announced on Sunday, and the Fiction Prize longlist features four Karavan Press titles as well as one title we distribute locally:

Congratulations to Mike, Andrew, Sarah, Nick, Lethu and all other longlisted Authors!

FICTION PRIZE

This is the 21st year of the Sunday Times fiction prize. The criteria stipulate that the winning novel should be one of “rare imagination and style … a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction”.

JUDGES

Siphiwo Mahala – Chair

Mahala is an award-winning author, playwright and academic, with a PhD in English Literature. He is the author of the novel, When a Man Cries (2007), two short story collections, African Delights and Red Apple Dreams and Other Stories, and two critically acclaimed plays, The House of Truth and Bloke and His American Bantu. His latest book Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of the Intellectual Tsotsi (2022), won the Creative Non-Fiction Award at the SA Literary Awards. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, Senior Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and editor of Imbiza Journal for African Writing.

Michele Magwood

In her long career Magwood has worked in radio, magazines and television and for 20 years was the Books Editor of the Sunday Times. She is the winner of two Mondi awards and the SALA award for literary journalism. A sought-after interviewer at book festivals, she currently works as a writer and editor and assesses manuscripts for publishers. She writes a books column for Business Day Wanted magazine. Magwood has a BA Honours degree from UKZN.

Dr Alma-Nalisha Cele

Cele is an experienced doctor with a demonstrated history of working in the pharmaceutical & health care industry. She is skilled in clinical skills, quality patient care, analytical skills, communication, and medicine. She holds a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery – MBBCH focused in Medicine from University of the Witwatersrand and a postgraduate diploma (cum laude) in medicine development at University of Stellenbosch. She is also the co-founder of The Cheeky Natives, a literary podcast primarily focused on the review, curatorship and archiving of black literature. In 2019, she was named one of the Mandela Washington Fellows to undertake a prestigious fellowship in the United States. She was also named one of the Mail & Guardian’s top 200 Young South Africans in 2019.

Karavan Press at the Cape Flats Book Festival 2023

The Cape Flats Book Festival will be taking place on 4 and 5 November this year, and I cannot encourage you enough to attend this wonderful festival. Last year was the first time Karavan Press participated and we had an amazing time. We are so happy to have been invited back and can’t wait!

The programme is packed with literary goodness. The venue – West End Primary School – is great. Books will be on sale. Parking and delicious food are available at the school throughout the weekend. The atmosphere is celebratory. And we have heard that Oaky will be there. You do not want to miss it!

This is what we are doing:

4 November

5 November

For more details see:

Cape Flats Book Festival

Hope to see you all there!

Open Book Festival 2023 – Bestsellers

Five of our books are among the fifteen bestselling books at Open Book Festival 2023!

Everyone Dies by Frankie Murrey (Karavan Press)

Glass Tower by Sarah Isaacs (Holland House Books, locally distributed by Karavan Press)

The Bitterness of Olives by Andrew Brown (Karavan Press)

Inside your body there are flowers by Diane Awerbuck (Karavan Press)

Striving for Social Equity edited by Joy Watson and Ogochukwu Nzewi (Karavan Press)

Thank you to all who bought a book!

Karavan Press and Friends at Open Book Festival 2023

In their latest newsletter, The Book Lounge, wrote the following about Karavan Press:

Karavan Press is a small publishing house owned and run by Karina Szczurek, seriously punching above its weight. We are so grateful to Karina for publishing so many wonderful books that we thought we should shine a light on some of the books she is responsible for that will be featured at Open Book Festival:

Everyone Dies by Frankie Murrey ~ An exquisite debut collection of stories – I will be cajoling Frankie on to the stage to talk about Everyone Dies. – Mervyn

A Crowded Lonely Walk by Sipho Banda ~ In this riveting poetry collection, Sipho Banda delves into the daily happenings of the ubiquitous but anonymous working class, and restores dignity to those whose lived experiences so often go overlooked. – Belinda

Glass Tower by Sarah Isaacs ~ Glass Tower is the winner of the inaugural Island Prize for debut fiction from Africa.

Inside your body there are flowers by Diane Awerbuck ~ an incredibly versatile writer who returns to the genre for which she is best known – the short story – in this new collection which is nothing short of superb.

The Bitterness of Olives is set in Gaza and Israel and is Andrew’s finest novel. Empathetic, thought provoking, beautifully written with the pace of a thriller. – Mervyn

Striving for Social Equity edited by Joy Watson and Ogochuku Nzewi ~ an invaluable gathering of voices touching on the very real challenges facing South Africans today.

What Remains by Dawn Garisch ~ new collection of stories from one of our best-loved writers that deals with relationships, ageing and so much more.

Karina will be participating in a discussion about the future of publishing.

The Book Lounge

We are immensely grateful for the encouragement and support! And this is how we will be “punching” at Open Book Festival 2023:

Open Book Festival 2023 Programme

Watch out for Karavan Press authors and Friends (we are lucky distribution partners for Glass Tower by Sarah Isaacs and Cat Therapy by Gail Gilbride):

Book your tickets here:

Open Book Festival – Webtickets

Karavan Press becomes local distribution partner for GLASS TOWER by Sarah Isaacs

WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT KARAVAN PRESS IS THE SOUTH AFRICAN DISTRIBUTION PARTNER FOR GLASS TOWER BY SARAH ISAACS, THE INAUGURAL WINNER OF THE ISLAND PRIZE.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Leilah meets Frankie, and the two misfits become the closest of friends at their new school – until secrets, betrayal, and sexuality drive them apart …

It’s 1997, three years after the official end of Apartheid in South Africa. Two girls from very different backgrounds, Leilah, who is mixed race, and Frankie, who is white, are drawn together when they start at a new school, one that remains racially divided despite the country’s new laws. Their friendship deepens and intensifies before suddenly falling apart when each tells the other a secret. The girls must grapple with young womanhood alone, leaving Leila with only her troubled family to fall back on.

Glass Tower is a powerful, beautiful story of two young people on a journey of sexual hurt and personal discovery which asks questions of who we are and why we love, set against a new and confusing social order.

Winner of the 2022 Island Prize for debut African novels

‘Sarah Isaacs writes with sensitivity and care about the pains of adolescence in a changing society coming to terms with the dark history of South Africa.’ — Karen Jennings, An Island, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARAH ISAACS is a writer and visual storyteller based in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in 1985 to a Coloured father and white mother, she occupied an undefinable place within the Apartheid system of racial division. Not belonging to one group or another has informed much of her life experience and continues to be one of the key drivers in her work. After graduating from a psychology degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2009, Sarah shifted her professional focus to portrait and documentary photography, creating safe spaces for South African women to share their everyday struggles. Boosted by the voices of those women she photographed, she was able to explore her own relationship to issues of identity, gender-based violence and the impact of infertility on a woman’s sense of self. In 2018, she invited victims of GBV to be photographed as a way of sharing their stories of sexual trauma and turned the lessons she learnt from that portrait series into a 2019 TEDx talk, which centred on survivor shame and its implications for the expression of vulnerability. Sarah completed Glass Tower in 2021. It went on to win The Island Prize for debut fiction from Africa in 2022.

Publisher: Holland House Books, UK

Publication date: 24 August 2023

ISBN: 978-1-7391047-4-0

HAPPY PUBLICATION DAY, SARAH!

If you are a bookseller, please contact BOOKSITE to order copies of Glass Tower. If you are a reader, please ask your local bookshop to order the book for you via Booksite.