Henrietta Rose-Innes wins £10,000 Caine prize

Click here to read Poison and here for an interview with Rose-Innes

Lindesay Irvine. Tuesday July 8, 2008. guardian.co.uk

South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes has won this year's £10,000 Caine prize for the best short story in English by an African writer. Rose-Innes, whose story Poison is a haunting vignette of the "new" South Africa, received the prize at a ceremony last night at Oxford University's Bodleian Library.

Jude Kelly, the Southbank Centre's artistic director and chair of this year's judges, praised "a sharp talent" with "a rare maturity and a poetic intelligence that is both subtle and deeply effective. It is writing of the highest order."

Poison, which was written in 2006, has already won the 2007 South African PEN Literary Award.

Rose-Innes is the author of two novels, Shark's Egg (2000) and The Rocket Alphabet (2004), but does not yet have a British publisher.

"This will allow me to do nothing but write for the next two years," she said this morning, adding that she hopes her writing will now attract more international attention.

She will also take up a writer's residence for a month in Georgetown University in Washington DC as part of her prize.

The four other shortlisted authors were Gill Schierhout, another South African, Mohammed Naseehu Ali from Ghana, Stanley Onjezani Kenani from Malawi and Uzor Maxim Uzoatu from Nigeria.

Jude Kelly was joined on the judging panel by the Jamaican poet and professor of English, Mark McMorris, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, Eritrean-born Guardian journalist Hannah Pool and the South African poet, novelist and lecturer Jonty Driver.

The prize, awarded annually for African creative writing, is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, who chaired the Booker prize management committee for nearly 25 years.

This is the ninth year of the prize. Last year's winner was Uganda's Monica Arac de Nyeko for Jambula Tree from the collection African Love Stories.

Select Bibliography

Shark’s Egg, Kwela Books, 2000

The Rock Alphabet, Kwela Books, 2004

Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa)

Henrietta Rose-Innes was born in 1971 in Cape Town and attended the University of Cape Town as an undergraduate, obtaining a BSc with a major in Archaeology. She then did Honours in Biological Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, returning to Cape Town in 1997 to complete a masters degree in Creative Writing.

She spent some time in publishing and travelled to South America. In 1996 she won the first Cosmopolitan / Vita short story competition. Her first novel, Shark’s Egg, was published in 2000 and was nominated for the M-Net Book Prize. Her second novel, The Rock Alphabet, was published in 2004 and has been an exciting addition to new South African writing. She has also had short stories and poems published in various newspapers and journals.

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s writing is usually triggered by strong visual images, often connected to the natural environment of the Cape and to the urban landscape of Cape Town. She is drawn to images relating to childhood and memory, history and prehistory. She hopes that the themes she explores – the past, loss and reclamation, human relationships to the physical landscape, has significance in the context of South African society as well as personal resonance.

Rose-Innes has participated in several public writer’s events, including the Litnet Online Literary Conference (2004), the Celebrate Women Book Festival, (Cape Town, 2004), Learning Cape (Cape Town, 2004), World Book Day, (Cape Town, 2004), Turning the Page (Cape Town, 2003), the 5th Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair (2001), and Old World New Images: Conversations on South African Writing (London, 2001).

She currently work as a literary editor and occasional TV/film scriptwriter and script editor, and she tutors a seminar in Writing for TV at the University of Cape Town. She is also compiling an anthology of South African writing, as well as working on several short stories and is beginning o a third novel.