We are delighted to announce that Dawn Garisch won SALA‘s Nadine Gordimer Short StoryAward 2024 for her collection, What Remains! This is the second prestigious award for What Remains. It also won the HSS Award for Best Fiction Short Stories earlier this year. Congratulations Dawn and What Remains!
The Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award is one of the South African Literature Awards (SALA). This year, two other Karavan Press titles featured on the SALA shortlists: Sipho Banda’s A Crowded Lonely Walk was nominated for the Poetry Award, and Diane Awerbuck’s Inside your body there are flowers was also nominated for Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. Congratulations to all nominated writers and books! And thank you, Dawn, Sipho and Diane for your amazing contributions to short story writing and poetry.
We are thrilled to announce that The Bitterness of Olivesby Andrew Brown won the 2024 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. The judges called it a “contemporaneous, daring, complex and aesthetically pleasing novel”. Congratulations, Andrew! And thank you – for writing, for sharing this story with your readers, for publishing it with Karavan Press.
‘Why can you not be friends anymore?’
It was the story of his country, he supposed. Perhaps they could have been friends. Perhaps they were once. The reasons were complex, full of feeling, disappointment, resentment. And, of course, betrayal. This was the Middle East after all.
Avi Dahan, a retired detective mourning his beloved wife in Tel Aviv, and Khalid Mansour, a Palestinian doctor confronting the precarious reality of living in Gaza City, are still reeling from the political fallout that jeopardised their delicate friendship. When a mysterious corpse scarred by history and forbidden love shows up in Khalid’s emergency room, he reaches out to Avi for help. Though the detective is the only one who might be able to assist, he is the last person on earth to agree …
The stage is set for Andrew Brown’s unforgettable new novel, The Bitterness of Olives.
Did it really matter? In the face of chaos, was it important how she had died? That was the guidance he needed from Avi now. He needed to understand that question: did it matter anymore? Was it of any significance, how you died in a war?
ANDREW BROWN is an advocate and a sergeant in the saps reserves and police liaison officer for the Child Protection Unit at Red Cross Children’s Hospital. He is the author of two non-fiction books and five novels, including Coldsleep Lullaby, winner of the Sunday Times Prize for Fiction in 2006, and Refuge, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Literature (Africa Region) in 2009. Street Blues: The Experiences of a Reluctant Policeman was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award the same year. Andrew’s books are published in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. He has three children and lives in Cape Town.
The winners of The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Competition have been announced earlier today. Congratulations to all, but especially Stephen Symons! Stephen’s poem, “Small Souls”, took the first prize in the competition. Karavan Press is the proud publisher of Stephen’s latest collection, FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT.
Congratulations to Caroline Gill! With her review of A Fractured Land by Melissa A. Volker Caroline wins the Karavan Press Review Competition and a book voucher worth R1000 for a bookshop of her choice. Thank you to all participants for reading, engaging with Melissa’s novels, A Fractured Land and Shadow Flicker, and submitting your entries for the competition. To show our appreciation, we would like to send you all a copy of Melissa’s next novel, provisionally titled Switchfoot, when it becomes available next year. In the meantime, we wish Caroline happy book buying and reading!
Congratulations to Caroline Gill! With her 
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