Russel Brownlee, Jane Taylor win Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose

The English Academy of Southern Africa is happy to announce the winners of the 2006 Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose. As there had been a number of excellent entries, the panel decided to split the prize between two novels, both first novels, with very honourable mention of a third. The joint winners are Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (Human & Rousseau, 2005) and Jane Taylor’s Of Wild Dogs (Double Storey Books, 2005). Honourable mention goes to Consuelo Roland’s The Good Cemetery Guide (Double Storey Books, 2005), which the judges describe as “an intensely readable creation of story and character”.

The panel had the following to say about the winners:

Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues is a devastating, imaginative presentation of what life in the early Cape could have been (and probably was!) like*. It is stylistically distinguished. The author has hammered out a curt, taut style. It is an impressive novelistic debut in which the more explicit moments are all the more brutally effective. It is a novel about survivors: those who manage against odds to preserve some shreds of fineness that hold out faint hope of a more humane and cultivated future.

Ebullience, by contrast, characterizes Jane Taylor’s mystery novel about contemporary South Africa or perhaps a South Africa that is only just beginning to emerge from its past. Taylor wields a lively and satirical pen and political correctness and some of our current holy cows, ubuntu, for example, get poked in the ribs. It is very refreshing and a hopeful portent for the future of writing in South Africa, though the novel is not untouched by the chamber of horrors*. The novel conveys the texture of an evolving society from which the horrors are beginning to recede.

Russel Brownlee completed a journalism degree at Stellenbosch in 1991 and then spent several years working as a radio news writer and magazine sub-editor in Johannesburg. He now lives in Cape Town where he works as a freelance writer and editor. Brownlee has been writing fiction for several years, but Garden of the Plagues is his first published work.

Jane Taylor holds the Skye Chair of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, and teaches courses in film studies, directing, and contemporary American theatre, as well as a graduate course on the thriller film and psychoanalysis. She has a background in theatre studies and a PhD in English from Northwestern University, Chicago, USA. Recently, Taylor’s work has included inquiries around the representation of remorse at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and at the World Court. She is currently working on a scholarly book on the performance of “Sincerity,” as well as a new novel.