Caine prize for African writing: shortlistees’ inspirations

Who

When I was 18, I came across a copy of Miriam Tlali’s Soweto Stories in a used bookshop in London. The price tag tells me that it cost £1, marked down. Until that point, my reading of South African literature had been dominated by writers like JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer: well-known writers whose glimpses of apartheid came, self-consciously, from a narrow window – the distance and limited view natural to a white South African perspective. I found in Tlali something completely different. Though her work is often unabashedly and explicitly polemical, its lens is focused on the tiny, intimate details of its non-white characters’ lives – a kind of transcendent intimacy of detail I would later admire in writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Jean Rhys.

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