Jonathan Ball welcomes the announcement that Jonny Steinberg’s Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey Through a Great Epidemic has been shortlisted for the inaugural Wellcome Trust Book Prize. The Trust aims to award £25,000 award yearly for the best fiction or non-fiction book centered on medicine:
Jonny Steinberg's Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man's Journey Through a Great Epidemic, a vivid narrative non-fiction examining the AIDS crisis in South Africa, has been shortlisted for the first ever Wellcome Trust Book Prize, a prestigious new £25,000 award for outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine. The winner will be announced at an awards reception at Wellcome Collection in London on 4 November 2009. Jonny Steinberg will be in the UK at the end of October for events leading up to the prize announcement, and for the announcement itself.
The winner will be announced on 4 November. Good luck to Steinberg!
Book details
Jonny Steinberg’s Three-latter Plague is a Sunday Times Alan Paton Award shortlistee. The paper’s books editor, Tymon Smith, interviewed him this weekend:
The central question of his latest book wasn’t initially apparent to two-time Alan Paton winner Jonny Steinberg.
What inspired you to write about HIV/Aids in the Transkei?
In 2001, a television production company sent me to Peddie, a small town in the Eastern Cape, to stop people on the streets and talk to them about Aids. By the end of the first day, my notebook was brimming with extraordinary stuff; people were speaking vividly about fundamental matters — death, desire, greed, blame. The question became: why not write a book about Aids? As for the Transkei, I chose it because an antiretroviral treatment programme in Lusikisiki, run by Médecins Sans Frontières, seemed to be blazing new trails.
How did you decide on your main character, Sizwe? What was it about him that interested you?
The second time I met Sizwe, we went for a long, slow walk — much slower than I’d ever walked before — through the hills around his village. By the time we got home, I knew that he would let me under his skin, and that there was a whole world under his skin. I was certain that he would fill a book, even if I didn’t yet know precisely what the book would be about.
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Michiel Heyns’ Bodies Politic is shortlisted for the 2009 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. This weekend, the newspaper ran an excerpt from the novel:
Word was passed round during exercise time that at bedtime we would all strip down completely and refuse to put on our prison clothes again. As this was in January, and the prison blankets were thin, we were exposing ourselves to physical hardship and worse: weak and emaciated with hunger-striking, we had few physical resources, and there was a real danger that some of the women might succumb. This, of course, the authorities knew as well as we did; besides, with the puritanism of all repressive regimes, they would be scandalised by the thought — or, worse, sight — of our naked bodies. They could violate our bodies by forcing tubes down our throats, but they felt threatened by those bodies in their natural state.
I cannot remember how Ethel came to be lodged with me on this night, as in general we were kept strictly apart. It is possible that she had contrived it with the cooperation of a wardress, one Mrs Smollett, with whom she had struck up an odd kind of friendship, based, I suspected, on certain traits they had in common.
Be that as it may, Ethel was lodged with me, and when the time came for us to lay off the vile prison garments, she asked to be permitted to help me.
“It’s only appropriate that you should have a servant to help you disrobe,” she said.
“Disrobe?” I asked. “Heavens, Ethel, such rags as these!”
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Tony Leon, joint winner of the 2009 Recht Malan Prize, drew on his admiration for Ernest Hemingway to survive a post-awards interview:
After last Saturday’s M-Net-Via Africa literary prize I found myself in the unexpected position of participating in a post-award interview.
Trying to match the occasion with some book knowledge, I did no better than invoke the character of Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He spoke of things “which are worth the fighting for”.
In the dying hours of the constitutional negotiations, back in November 1993 at Kempton Park, I led the fight-back against a National Party-African National Congress deal that would have empowered the president and his cabinet to have effectively hand-picked their own Constitutional Court. The minuscule Democratic Party, sidelined on many other key issues, managed to win this battle.
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