The longlist for the 2018 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award has been announced!

For the past 14 years, first as the European Union Literary Award and now as the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, the prize has unearthed great new South African literary talent.

Dinaane aims to promote new southern African fiction that speaks to both a local and international audience. It encourages new writers and new readers by publishing material which would likely otherwise not have been selected – for purely commercial reasons – by local publishers of literature.

The winner is awarded R 35,000 and publication by Jacana Media, and the winning title is supported by Exclusive Books.

Entries were judged blind by a panel comprising David Medalie (chair), Rehana Rossouw and Songeziwe Mahlangu. The judges read over 60 manuscripts and were able to arrive at a longlist of six.

2018 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award longlist
(in alphabetical order)

• Go-Away Birds by Michelle Edwards
• Legacy of a Rain Queen: The Eagle’s Martial by Tao Sophia
• Not to Mention by Vivian de Klerk
• Shiloh on my Mind by Taylor Fiona
• The Mourning Bird by Kalimamukwento Mubanga
• The University Currently Known As … by Anton Krueger

The shortlist of the manuscripts will be announced next month and the overall winner will be announced at an award ceremony later this year at the University of Johannesburg.

The JLF will also present the Kraak Writing Award with the winning writer selected from the runners-up. The grant is valued at R25 000 and dedicated to the memory of Gerald Kraak. It will offer the recipient mentoring and intensive coaching from an editor/publishing expert, enabling the author to refine and develop their work further.

‘In 2018 the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, which is open to writers who have not yet published a novel, drew 65 submissions. Focusing for the most part on the history and present realities of life in Southern Africa, the manuscripts offer a wide range of imaginative responses, ranging from the fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the comic to the dystopian. The six manuscripts that have been selected for the longlist reflect something of this diversity of themes and modes of writing.’ – David Medalie

Judging panel

Chair of the panel, David Medalie, is an award-winning writer and has many years’ experience teaching creative writing. He is a short story writer, novelist and anthologist. His publications include two collections of short stories, The Shooting of the Christmas Cows (1990, David Philip) and The Mistress’s Dog (2010, Picador Africa/ Pan Macmillan) and a novel, The Shadow Follows (2006, Picador Africa/Pan Macmillan). He has edited two anthologies of South African short stories, Encounters (1998) and Recognition (2017), both published by Wits University Press. Medalie’s writing has won or been shortlisted for a number of literary awards.

Rehana Rossouw was born and is rooted in Cape Town, but is currently in self-imposed exile in Johannesburg. She has been a journalist for three decades and has also taught journalism and creative writing. She has a master’s in creative writing from Wits University. What Will People Say?, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature and won the 2017 Humanities and Social Sciences Award in the category of single-authored fiction. Her second novel, New Times, was also released in 2017.

Songeziwe Mahlangu was born in Alice in 1985. He matriculated from Dale College, in King William’s Town, and went on to do a business science degree at the University of Cape Town. He returned to university to do a master’s degree in creative writing at Rhodes, Grahamstown in 2011. Penumbra, his debut novel, is the end result of that degree. Penumbra was shortlisted for the 2014 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and won the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature.

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Awards David Medalie Dinaane Debut Fiction Award Jacana Literary Foundation Jacana Media News Rehana Rossouw Songeziwe Mahlangu