Central News Agency Literary Award (CNA Literary Award)
Subcategory of Awards International Awards
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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 1984

winner y separately published work icon Life & Times of Michael K J. M. Coetzee , Johannesburg : Ravan Press , 1974 6181890 1974 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

"From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, another startling and disturbing portrait of today's South Africa, a land and a people beset by violence and siege. Coetzee here tells the story of a handicapped young man who has worked as a municipal gardener in Cape Town. His mother is dying, and she wishes to return to her birthplace out in the veldt. Without the required transit passes, mother and son set out on a journey that will end in death for her and in a new but temporary life on an abandoned farm for him. His respite in isolation and peace does not last long, however; grotesque reality soon returns to trouble this quiet new world. Against the solitude of this private drama, Coetzee paints an eloquent and pained picture of his homeland and of the bureaucrats, doctors, army deserters, and camp guards who reveal the stress and qualms of their existence and who uneasily sense that there is no conclusion to their troubles and no future for their lives." (Source: Libraries Australia)

Year: 1980

winner y separately published work icon Waiting for the Barbarians J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1980 6303247 1980 single work novel 'How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid? Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.

After twenty years of peacefully running one of the Empire’s settlements, a magistrate takes pity on an enemy barbarian who has been tortured. He enters into an awkward intimate relationship with her, and then is himself imprisoned as an enemy of the state.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a disturbing political fable about oppression, the fraught desire for reparation, and about living with a troubled conscience under an unjust regime.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 1977

winner y separately published work icon In the Heart of the Country J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1977 6204795 1977 single work novel
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