James Clelland for his novel, Deeper than Colour

Thematically, Deeper than Colour explores the wide gulf between our view of ourselves, how we are seen by others, and the dispassionate images seen through the cold lens of a camera. Angus has been traumatised by his time on the Border and now begins to film himself doing ordinary things, to try to understand his life. It is impossible, he says, for an abnormal person to have a normal life in an abnormal city like Johannesburg. The effect of the Border War on young white males has received little attention from novelists. Many troubled people are roaming our deeply divided country.

It is these circumstances of present and remembered trauma that became the melting pot from which Deeper than Colour emerged.

About the Author
James Clelland was born in Scotland, but has lived most of his adult life in Johannesburg, having emigrated here in 1982 as a research biochemist. He is a Doctor of Biochemistry and has published a wide variety of scientific articles in international journals. James became a citizen of South Africa in 1992. He has been writing most of his adult life and has published about a dozen short stories in various UK literary magazines. One short story won a prize in a Scots language competition, while two were published in UK Arts Council anthologies. Writing continued in South Africa, as a writer for Woman’s Forum, fiction reviewer for the Rand Daily Mail, and short story writer for Springbok Radio.

Comments from the Jury
Deeper than Colour tells a tale that is seldom told in the new South Africa: the effects of supporting apartheid on the white population. The script also deals with difficult issues in the new dispensation.

This is a morbid but gripping work that deals with the inexorable passage of its protagonist from terminally disaffected husband to perversely inspired engineer of his own fate.

From the very outset, the reader is seduced into the paranoically obsessive world of Angus Smith, who, we later discover, is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is only some way into the narrative that we realise that Angus’s perspective is psychotic and unreliable, but by then it’s too late. Like him, we have to see it through to the end.

And Angus has ensured that his fate is shared by millions.

A bitter and disturbing but compulsively readable book, Deeper than Colour raises unsettling questions about our socially fractured society.

Short-Listed Authors

Norman Baines for his novel Fine land

The book is set in late 1989 and early 1990, the end of the old South Africa and the tentative beginning of the new. It is the story of a white businessman, Joe Fine, who disappears, presumed dead, and another white man, James Baden, who as a past business associate becomes involved both with Fine’s wife or widow and the remainder of Fine’s business.

Slowly it becomes clear that Fine is not dead, and that he is of interest both to a South African Security policeman and to the ANC.

It turns into a journey of personal and political discovery for Baden, and also the story of Fine’s complicated and devious life.

It is also a story about books, because it is mostly through Fine’s books, their themes of isolated, idealistic, corrupt, or lost men that Baden works out where Fine is.

It is briefly, but crucially, about a farm in the desolate karoo, a lovely landscape, a devastated farm which will eventually, if nurtured, become good land, fine land, and about a country which will do the same, as many characters in the book observe, in different ways.

About the Author

Norman Baines was born in Johannesburg in 1950 and still lives there. He was schooled at St Johns College in Johannesburg, and then educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he obtained a degree in Archaeology and Classical Greek. He later obtained an Honours degree in Biblical Studies from Wits.

Since 1995, he has been closely involved with the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve which conserves indigenous veld and flora. For the last two years he has written a weekly column called “A View from the Koppies” for a local newspaper.

He lives with his partner Rika in Westdene, where they share a house with three cats.

Claire Robertson for her novel Master Land 

Master Land is told in two stories that unfold in alternating chapters.

On a distant estate, an apprentice and her wigmaker master have been called to help disguise the young mistress who has lost her hair.

It is 1794. The Enlightenment has reached Vogelzang and the master of the estate is absorbed in weird science involving the specifications of human types. Almost two hundred years later, in the far north of the Union of South Africa, an immaculate sister at Mannamead mission hospital sets about her halting emancipation. Vergilius has raised the mission ward, Jacob, and chafes to resume her life more than a decade after a spate of ministering to the dying during the War sent her fleeing to the order. Watching her and telling her story is the district’s only English-speaking farmer, himself kept under a close eye by the local security policeman. It is 1961. The country is about to declare itself a republic.

About the Author

Claire Robertson, 48, lives in Simon’s Town and has two daughters. She has spent the past

29 years as a journalist, reporting from the US and USSR and places beyond, but mostly in and on South Africa, particularly during the crisis days of apartheid and the coming to birth of a democratic South Africa. She has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio and television as a writer, producer, editor and executive. Claire has won awards for her reporting and her work is carried in several anthologies and in the South African Dictionary of Quotations. She contributed to a study on the negotiations process that led to the dismantling of apartheid, The Small Miracle: South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement, and edited a social history of Johannesburg, Remembering Old Johannesburg. Master Land is her first work of fiction.