Announcing the “Short Sharp Stories Award”

The National Arts Festival is thrilled to announce the launch of the “Short Sharp Stories Award” for South African short-story fiction.  An anthology of selected stories will be published annually and the theme will differ from year to year.

The winning stories, selected from the stories to be published, by a panel of independent judges, will be announced at an annual launch event at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

It is the aim of this new award to encourage, support, and showcase established and emerging South African writing talent.

The first volume, scheduled for publication in July 2013, will be devoted to crime-thriller fiction. At least twenty stories will be published in what will be an exciting home-grown collection.

 We are also thrilled to announce that internationally acclaimed crime-fiction author Deon Meyer will write the foreword to this first anthology.

We can’t wait to read your killer tales glinting sharp as knives. If you are working on something slick, sexy, flirty, dangerous, a twist-in-the-tale story that delivers a measure of justice, well, that’s just up our street. Skop skiet en donder is one way to go about it, but, while we look forward to those nail-biting, thrilling tales with an element of the sinister, we will also welcome clever stories that focus on smaller, more subtle crimes that we commit on a daily basis when we think we can break the law with impunity. We’re hoping too that a number of stories will deliver that measure of justice so sorely needed in South Africa.

The only proviso is that the story must be set in South Africa – from the dusty streets of the Karoo in summer, to the slopes of a rain battered Table Mountain, from Durban’s beaches to the derelict streets of inner Jozi, the diversity of setting is as exciting as the diversity of voice which South Africa has to offer.