It was a surprisingly mild winter night in Cape Town but the buzz in the ballroom of the Table Bay Hotel was electric as literary luminaries, the media and a splash of celebrities gathered for the 2011 M-Net Literary Awards last weekend.
The awards event is unique is SA as it invites nominations in all 11 of the country’s official languages.
This year, awards were presented in four different language categories – Afrikaans, English, Nguni and Sotho.
The new addition – the M-Net Literary Award in the film category – was reserved for the novel that shows the most potential to be adapted into a commercially-viable feature film.
Noted author Ivan Vladislavic won in the English category for his novel Double Negative.
The novel was written as a counter-piece to a book of photographs depicting Johannesburg by renowned photographer David Goldblatt.
Judges commended Double Negative for its special significance in the current age of overlapping virtual realities and deep hunger for real visual surfaces rather than imagined depth.
Other winners on the night were Afrikaans author Ingrid Winterbach for her latest novel Die Benederyk; KJ Sekele in the Sotho category for his novel Lehutšho; and in the Nguni category the winner was Ncedile Saule’s Inkululeko Isentambeni.
The loudest applause on the night was for Cynthia Jele, whose debut novel, Happiness is a Four Letter Word, won in the film category.
In her acceptance speech Jele told the audience she wrote the novel in response to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club list.
She decided to read every novel recommended by the famous talk show host, but the stories were so “heavy”, she decided to write the book she, and many young women like her, would want to read.
Jele’s novel tells the story of “sistas” and “fashionistas” who frequent the malls in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
The winners in each category received R50 000.
In its 20th year, the M-Net Literary Awards has gone from strength to strength with a particular interest in fostering a culture of reading in young South Africans.
The broadcaster plans to extend the M-Net Naledi initiative, which facilitates fun-filled reading programmes at rural and less privileged schools. And who better to drive this project than Miss SA herself – Bokang Montjane.
Not just a pretty face, the reigning Miss SA is passionate about the need to nurture a reading culture in South Africa for many reasons –- not least of which is her own rural school background where the privilege of having a library at school was non-existent.