I received an invitation for a Book Launch for Pumla Dineo Gqola’s book ‘Rape: A South African Nightmare’ on the 25^th 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.