THOMAS PRINGLE AWARD FOR REVIEWS, 2008

REVIEWS IN THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH BY MARY CORRIGALL
21 March 2009

The arts review is a marginalised genus of journalism. Many newspaper editors perceive it as a superfluous addition to their editorial content. This is one of the reasons why this award carries such significance for arts writers; it not only affirms the practice of examining and critiquing cultural products and the role that plays in developing the arts but it also valorises excellence in this area of writing.

For this the English Academy should be commended for there are no other bodies or awards that reward reviewers. This actuality inculcates the idea that this writing discipline is an unimportant and unessential service to the public and the arts community. But reviewing isn’t simply about casting a critical eye over cultural products in the public domain but in interpreting and identifying the significance of these works. At the same time, however, because the arts are so under-patronised and under-funded in this country there is a pervasive sense that arts writers are obliged to praise any cultural product regardless of its quality, impact or contribution to the predominant discourses in the various spheres of the arts. Certainly newspaper editors don’t demand the same level of critical analysis from their arts writers as they do from their hard news writers nor do they expect them to be knowledgeable in their field of interest. For this reason the standard of arts reviews in the mainstream media has tended and continues to be inadequate.

An award such as this, however, sets a standard for arts journalism. As a fledging arts writer, I certainly aspired to the standard of arts writing set by many of the previous recipients of this award. I am thinking especially of one of my ex- colleagues, Robert Greig, who won this award on several occasions. In the absence of quality arts journalism, Greig provided me with a model which I aspired to and adapted to suit my own idiosyncratic writing and ideological approach to assessing and interpreting cultural products. He also encouraged me to never ‘dumb down’ my copy, which in the context of the mainstream press is often a tricky endeavour. That my arts writing has now too been acknowledged by the Academy suggests to me that I have reached the goal I set for myself when I began to read the reviews of the many esteemed writers who have received this award before me. In legitimising what I do and the practice of arts reviewing this award gives me the confidence and determination to continue reporting on the arts critically, intelligently and elegantly.

THOMAS PRINGLE AWARD FOR SHORT STORIES

“THE MISTRESS’S DOG”, New Contrast, vol. 34 no.6, December 2006, pp.45-52.

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH BY DAVID MEDALIE

21 March 2009

I wish to thank the English Academy for honouring me with the Thomas Pringle Award for short stories for 2008. On two occasions in the past I have been a member of the judging committee for this award, and it is a special pleasure to find myself a recipient of it today.

I would also like to thank my family and friends for their support and for making the effort to be here. I need to include a special word of thanks to the writing group – most of whom are here today – of which I am a member. Thank you all for the creative and nurturing environment which you provide. It is a privilege to share my work with you and to receive feedback from you at every stage of the writing process.

Some of you may not be aware that one of the runners-up for the Thomas Pringle Award is a short story by the English Academy’s own admin officer, Naomi Nkealah. I would like to extend my warmest congratulations to Naomi. I am fortunate enough to be familiar with some of her short stories. She is a talented and original writer whose work is beginning to receive the recognition which it deserves.

I commend the English Academy for making a special award for short fiction, and thus recognising the art of the short story and its importance. For I regret to say that the short story – a genre in which, in the past, our writers have excelled – is not flourishing in South Africa today. Sales of short story collections are notoriously poor, which makes publishers reluctant to publish single-author collections, and anthologies consisting of stories by a number of writers appear only if there is a strong likelihood that they will be prescribed. There are very few literary journals remaining locally which publish creative writing, and even fewer which will accept prose submissions.

My lament, I need to stress, is general, not personal: I am very fortunate in having a publisher who is prepared to depart from the trend I have just described. Early in 2010 Picador Africa/ Pan Macmillan will be publishing a new collection of my short stories, entitled The Mistress’s Dog –which is, of course, also the title of the prizewinning story. But the wider problem remains. The dwindling away of the short story in a country which produced The Little Karoo, Mafeking Road and Friday’s Footprints must be distressing to everyone who cares about South African literature.

In addition to the multitude of themes and reflections upon society which short stories provide, what is also of tremendous value are the qualities of craftsmanship and language they evince. Fine short stories, in their subtlety, economy and precision, reveal the use of language at its most adept.

In an essay entitled ‘Craftsmanship’, initially presented as a radio broadcast in April 1937, Virginia Woolf discusses the relationship between language and craftsmanship. Her comments are particularly pertinent to the short story, for she speaks of the ‘suggestive power of words’ (Woolf 1942: 174) and it tends to be that very suggestiveness, the play of implications, which gives a short story its unique appeal. Words, suggests Woolf, are ‘the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things’ (175). Their meanings are fluid and contingent upon the contexts in which they occur:

The truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. (177)

At the end of the essay Woolf construes the relationship between language and selfhood in terms of the notion of ‘privacy’:

Words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light…(177)

We need the privacy of words: in our communion with ourselves, in the kind of solitude that engenders creativity, in solitary reading. But we need also the public face of words: in our communion with others, in publishing, teaching and reading together, which is why a decline locally in the availability and, consequentially, the reading of short stories is deeply to be regretted.

Creativity in writing has as its core the revival of language deadened by heedless usage. Short stories compel writers to use language thoughtfully, and they convey the urgency of that thoughtfulness to their readers. At their best they enact the renewal of language described in what I consider to be one of the most profound analyses of the act of creativity, Joseph Conrad’s famous Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, published in 1897:

It is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage’. (Conrad 1963: 12)

Nadine Gordimer has described fiction as ‘a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life’ (Gordimer 1983: 12). Short stories give us slices or shards of those possibilities, fragments reconstituted into wholeness.

WORKS CITED

• Conrad. Joseph. ‘Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Typhoon and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
• Gordimer, Nadine. ‘Introduction’. Selected Stories. London: Penguin, 1983.
• Woolf, Virginia. ‘Craftsmanship’ (1937). The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.