The winners of the 2022 Sunday Times Literary Awards have been announced!

Mignonne Breier has won the Non-fiction Award for her book Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre, and Tshidiso Moletsane is the winner of the Fiction Prize for his novel Junx.

The two awards celebrate ‘the best of South African non-fiction and fiction’ from the previous year. This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the non-fiction award, and the 21st year of the fiction prize. Each winner receives R100,000, marking the award as one of the richest literary prizes on the continent.

Bloody Sunday explores the massacre at an ANC Youth League event in Duncan Village, East London, in 1952, where police killed more than two hundred people, and the mod-led murder of Sister Aidan Quinlan, an Irish nun and medical doctor who ran a clinic in the area.

The Non-fiction Award judges, Griffin Shea (chair), Nomavenda Mathiane and Bongani Ngqulunga, said of Breier’s book:

‘In this stunning book, the author left no stone unturned, which brings into sharp focus the hard life residents led in those days and goes a long way to illustrate the persecution of the leaders by the police.’

For the Fiction Award, the criteria is: ‘The winner 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 panel of judges for the Fiction Award, Ekow Duker (chair), Kevin Ritchie and Nomboniso Gasa, called Junx a ‘tour de force … bold, raw and surprisingly elegant Gonzo-style writing’.

• Read more on The JRB
• Read an excerpt from Tshidiso Moletsane’s explosive new novel Junx

Categories Fiction Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Bloody Sunday Junx Mignonne Breier Sunday Times Literary Awards Tshidiso Moletsane