‘It’s an exciting time to be a short story writer’
- Wits Alumni Relations
Winner of the 2024 Thomas Pringle Award says the shorter format is best for writing now.
At the close of last year, writer, editor and arts journalist David Mann (MA 2022) was announced as the winner of the prestigious 2024 Thomas Pringle Award for best short story published in a Southern African Journal.
The award, given by the English Academy of Southern Africa, was for Mann’s “Meaningful Contributions”, published by wherewithall in 2023.
The judges said: “This piece is evocative, and the twist-in-the-tale is elegantly crafted.
“Mann leads the reader through Cape Town, following three artists collaborating on an internationally sponsored project. Each character has a distinct voice, making for a disjointed narrative that speaks both to their attempts at working together while foregrounding their different perspectives, artistic skills and personal agendas. This same disjunction is reflected in an uncooperative cityscape, where theft of exhibits and lethargy are endemic. The narrative comes to a succinctly ironic climax at the end of the story.”
In response to receiving the accolade Mann said: “It’s an exciting time to be a short story writer. The short form has become the medium through which we do so much of our contemporary reading, writing, viewing, and thinking.”
“For me, the short form has become an increasingly valid strategy for testing new ideas, experimenting with form and language, and allowing oneself to play without fear of failure. Importantly, it is also an urgent and exciting creative output of its own. Short stories can be brief, sharp and vivid vignettes of our own lives and the lives of others, that have a tremendous capacity for generating intrigue and empathy. As the writer Orhan Pamuk puts it: ‘From tiny experiences, we build cathedrals’."
Mann is best known for his work with The Centre for the Less Good Idea, which was featured in the 2024 October edition of Wits Review.
Inspired by the South African art world, he also published a collection of 13 stories in Once Removed (Botsotso, 2024). Most of the stories in the collection were written during his time in the Creative Writing master's programme at Wits. His stories have been described as “part wry realism” and “part experimental surrealism” and have been well received by respected reviewers, including Prof Michael Titlestad, head of Department of English at Wits: “The stories comprising Once Removed are consistently excellent: they are elegantly composed and provoking. Each depicts and evokes places, scenes, and interactions in subtle yet vivid ways. I have not been this compelled by a collection of short fiction in a considerable time.”
Source: English Academy of Southern Africa