I received an invitation for a Book Launch for Pumla Dineo
Gqola’s book ‘Rape: A South African Nightmare’ on the 25th of
February 2016. Little did I know that she would recieve the Alan Paton Award for her book.
The Sunday Times Literary Awards are composed of two awards, fiction and non-fiction, given by the South African newspaper The Sunday Times. The awards are the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (formerly Sunday Times Fiction Prize 2001-2014) and the Alan Paton Award for works of non-fiction (1989-present).
The prize was restructured in 2015 with the Sunday Times Fiction Prize renamed the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, which was then merged with the Alan Paton Award to form the Sunday Times Literary Awards; the money for each prize was increased in 2015 from R75 000 to R100 000.[1]
In Rape: A South African Nightmare, Pumla Dineo
Gqola unpacks the complex relationship South Africa has with rape by paying
attention to the patterns and trends of rape, asking what we can learn from
famous cases and why South Africa is losing the battle against rape. This
highly readable book asks provocative questions and examines the shock belief
syndrome that characterises public responses to rape, the female fear factory,
boy rape, the rape of Black lesbians and violent masculinities. The book
interrogates the high profile rape trials of Jacob Zuma, Bob Hewitt, Makhaya
Ntini and Baby Tshepang as well as the feminist responses to the Anene Booysen
case.
Pumla Dineo Gqola is the author of What
is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave memory in
Post-apartheid South Africa (published by Wits Press in 2010), A Renegade
Called Simphiwe (published by MFBooks Joburg in 2013) and editor of Regarding
Winnie: Feminism, race and nation in global representations of Winnie
Madikizela Mandela (forthcoming with Cassava Republic Press). She
has written non-fiction and opinion pieces for Pambazuka, Mail
& Guardian, The Weekender and City Press as well as the British publications
BBC Focus on Africa, SABLE and Drum (UK) and short stories in literary journals
and books published in South Africa, the USA and the UK. Pumla holds MA degrees
from the universities of Cape Town and Warwick, UK, and a PhD from the Ludwig
Maximillian University of Munich, Germany. She is a Professor of African
literary and gender studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.