All prizes South Africa
South Africa · Since 2001 · For books in Afrikaans
Awarded each year by the University of Johannesburg (until 2005 Rand Afrikaans University, as the RAU-prys) to the best creative book of any genre written in Afrikaans and published the year before; a separate debut prize is not listed here. Shortlists are known from 2011 on.
The prize was first awarded in 2001 as the RAU Mardene Marais Prize at Rand Afrikaans University, made possible by a donation from Dr Fanie Marais of the Cordis Trust. When the university merged into the new University of Johannesburg in 2005, the prize was renamed and a prize for English books was added; prizes for Zulu, Northern Sotho and literary translation followed in 2021. Books of any genre are eligible, and a panel of literary scholars from several universities chooses the shortlists and winners. In 2026, 65 books were entered and the shortlists were announced in June. The main prize is worth R70,000 and the debut prize R35,000. Marlene van Niekerk has won three times, first with Agaat in 2005; Ingrid Winterbach, S.J. Naudé, Etienne van Heerden and Antjie Krog have also won more than once.
UJ-prys 2026 · Shortlist
Poetry · 78 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that find beauty in the banal, turning gardening into ritual and burglar bars, wire hangers and window frames into accidental architecture, in conversation with D.J. Opperman, Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman.
UJ-prys 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Prince”
Ryan Pedro · 32 when first published
Poetry · 80 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that dissect masculinity, celebrating its moments of tenderness and criticising its destructive side, as the speaker, a poet and a coloured man, writes deliberately against preconceived ideas about coloured boys.
UJ-prys 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Kings”
Novel · 240 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:The Minister orders two civil servants, Pixley, of Zulu nobility, and Joubert, said to descend from General Piet Joubert, to tour the country, inspect its apartheid and colonial monuments and draw up a plan to remove them.
UJ-prys 2026 · Shortlist
Willem Anker · 46 when first published
Novella · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:After a meteorite crashes into a country town, a composer looking for inspiration for a science-fiction film score lodges with an astronomer who studies gravitational vortices and whose eight-year-old son does not speak.
UJ-prys 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“You and I Don’t Exist”
Danie Marais · 53 when first published
Poetry · 128 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that strike up frank, intimate conversations with the reader about the discomforts of race and class among the white middle class of Stellenbosch, where a cold civil war rages quietly in the leafy suburban streets.
UJ-prys 2025 · Shortlist
Poetry · 112 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems on the vulnerability of children, pregnancy loss, gender, desire and mental health, named after a monument at Steinkopf in the Northern Cape to a little-known killing of children, and enriched with Gariep Afrikaans and Nama words.
UJ-prys 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Bones”
Etienne van Heerden · 69 when first published
Novel · 408 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Magistrate Imker Goedeman arrives by an unexpected train in Gebeente, a hamlet on the Forgotten Highway north of Sutherland that a sensational farm murder has shaken, to investigate a stranger case still: the theft of the Milky Way.
UJ-prys 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Myrrh and Aloes”
Drama · 68 pages
AI-generated summary:On a farm outside Oudtshoorn, Jessie turns up at her parents’ house in underwear and boots just as a bush bursts into flame. Her mother is not glad to see her, her little sister is overjoyed, and her nearly blind grandmother wears a chain on her foot.
UJ-prys 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Now in Infrared”
Tom Dreyer · 51 when first published
Poetry · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that weave physics, metaphysics and science fiction into travel verse about places near and far, and explore what the eye cannot see: identity, the search for where one belongs, longing and love.
UJ-prys 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ship of Fools”
Poetry
AI-generated summary:A ship of fools in verse: satirical poems that take on human achievement from classical writers and myth to music, painting and the present, and mock the violence, corruption and incompetence of South Africa’s politicians and officials.
UJ-prys 2023 · Shortlist
Novel · 256 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Eugene grew up among the gangsters of the ghetto in the 1960s to 1980s and now looks upper middle class. Years after his bonds with his childhood friends Alan, Huey and Jenny broke in Hillbrow, he is charged with murder.
UJ-prys 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Mother Tongue”
Poetry · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems about the poet’s forebears, the First Indigenous people of Africa’s southern tip, centred on a life-giving mother figure whose oppressed and overlooked part, like that of their language, the poems set out to restore.
UJ-prys 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Testimony”
Francois Smith · 57 when first published
Novella · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:A married couple’s account of a journey to Ventershoop, on which a man they call Father sent them and paid for everything, on the understanding that they would bear witness to a miracle.
UJ-prys 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ancestor. Pilgrim. Mountain.”
Ingrid Winterbach · 73 when first published
Novel · 288 pages
AI-generated summary:Katerina Steenkamp, her eye on the mountain, tries online dating with unexpected results; a man full of apocalyptic phrases patrols the streets; another watches the night sky for an elliptical craft; and an old woman looks back on her marriage and her three sisters.
UJ-prys 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Compound”
Ronelda S. Kamfer · 40 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Raised by their grandmother on a farm in the Overberg, cousins Nadia and Xavie look back on their childhood and try to uncover the things their family has always kept quiet about.
UJ-prys 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Universe on My Tongue”
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:Willemien is sick of being fat and of being afraid of cheese and of shopping. In the scorching heat of the Richtersveld she and her sister drag a safe in a shopping trolley, and she is determined to push it over a cliff.
UJ-prys 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“With an Eye on Tomorrow”
Antjie Krog · 68 when first published
Drama · Historical
AI-generated summary:A verse drama about the friendship between a black king and his white missionary, Moshoeshoe I and Eugène Casalis, who over twenty years face the challenges of working and living together with an eye on a prosperous future.
UJ-prys 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Accountability”
Jaco Fouché · 53 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Jaco Diehl, who lives in Hermanus, witnesses an attempt on his neighbour’s life and is gradually drawn into other acts of violence, in Hermanus, Somerset West and finally Cape Town, while his own life falls apart.
UJ-prys 2021 · Shortlist
Poetry · 64 pages
AI-generated summary:A counter-epic built from little more than a restaurant name in Hermanus, Bientang’s Cave, and the passing remark that she was the last Strandloper: poems that trace the outline of a woman written history has left without a trace.
UJ-prys 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In a Land Without Birds”
Harry Kalmer · 63 when first published
Novel · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the fifteenth year of the Econocracy, democracy is a thing of the past, a Corporation rules and nature is out of control. Adam, a man whose sight is failing, has lost his daughter Jemima, and his wife Sybille is gone too.
UJ-prys 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Feather Woman”
Jan van Tonder · 65 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Liora grows up on an ostrich farm in Algeria, spending her days in her aunt’s feather workshop. When unrest forces the family to flee, years in Paris follow before she arrives in the Little Karoo in search of her uncle Moshe.
UJ-prys 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Dog’s Thought”
Kerneels Breytenbach · 67 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Fleur de Villiers, an investigative journalist who prefers good food and wine and knows nothing about rugby, is asked by her old friend Maurice Kumalo to write a biography of the Springbok captain Katstert Nel on the eve of the 2025 World Cup.
UJ-prys 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Year of Punishment”
Novel
AI-generated summary:When his aunt is jailed for fraud and spends a year in Pollsmoor, a naive, nameless researcher who studies the first ships at the Cape swaps the library for the prison’s waiting room, and is drawn ever deeper into the lives of those waiting to be let in or out.
UJ-prys 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Old Woman and the Priest and Other Stories”
Cecile Cilliers · 85 when first published
Short stories · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories told from a woman’s point of view, among them one about a schoolgirl’s unanswered love for an older man that marks the rest of her life, and one about the power of smell that brings back a lost world of hatboxes and furs.
UJ-prys 2019 · Shortlist
Die troebel tyd
Ingrid Winterbach · 70 when first published
Novel · 196 pages
AI-generated summary:On the wrong antidepressant, the zoologist Magrieta Prinsloo loses her head, insults her head of department and ends her distinguished academic career. She takes a post at the Bureau for Continuing Education, where colleagues and whales alike send her life in a new direction.
UJ-prys 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In Glass”
Drama
AI-generated summary:A childless couple undergoes IVF, and their longing for a child takes its toll on each of them, on their marriage and on their friendships: humiliating visits to unsympathetic doctors, monitored sex, a man and a woman reduced to their reproductive organs.
UJ-prys 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Prayer Beads”
Pieter Fourie · 78 when first published
Poetry · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems in a folk-realist vein, close to the rural dialect poetry of Boerneef, that take inventory, cast spells against transience and speak with the Unseen in age-old metaphors.
UJ-prys 2018 · Shortlist
Spertyd
Elsa Joubert · 95 when first published
Nonfiction · 212 pages
AI-generated summary:The last part of a writer’s autobiographical trilogy, about her later years in a retirement home in Cape Town, where her experience of the present is woven together with memories reaching much further back.
UJ-prys 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The World of Charlie Oeng”
Etienne van Heerden · 63 when first published
Novel · 560 pages
AI-generated summary:Tian Kilian saw his parents murdered on the night of the fireworks. Now he travels to Amsterdam and on to the East, on the trail of Charlie Oeng, also known as Gelatenheid or Chinees, to understand at last the pain of that time.
UJ-prys 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Envoy of the Medlars”
Marlene van Niekerk · 64 when first published
Poetry · 68 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems on a dozen paintings by the little-known Dutch painter Adriaen Coorte (c. 1659–1707), each printed in colour beside an Afrikaans poem and, on the next page, its Dutch translation.
UJ-prys 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In the Quiet Back Room”
Marlene van Niekerk · 64 when first published
Poetry · 68 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems on a dozen paintings by the little-known Dutch painter Jan Mankes (1889–1920), each printed in colour beside an Afrikaans poem and its Dutch translation, imagining his moments of inspiration, his technique and his world.
UJ-prys 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ash in the Mouth”
Nicole Jaekel Strauss · 45 when first published
Short stories
AI-generated summary:Interlinked stories: a childless mother on a Greek island, a home-industry baker who changes out of his men’s clothes to become Aisha for his deliveries, two boys eyeing each other over lemon meringues, a young saint dying at the stake, all tied to one night of flames.
UJ-prys 2017 · Shortlist
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:For decades Peet van Jaarsveld has ruled his Karoo goat farm with an iron hand. Widowed and ever more isolated from his children and the community, he lives through a long weekend in December 1960 that puts his age, stubbornness and decline under the magnifying glass.
UJ-prys 2017 · Shortlist
Novel · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:At the Cape in 1795, William Ferdinand, a senior official of the Dutch East India Company and leader of its corps of clerks, watches a weak governor and a vain colonel fail to prepare the colony as the British close in.
UJ-prys 2017 · Shortlist
Koors
Deon Meyer · 58 when first published
Novel · 584 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A fever has killed almost everyone. Thirteen-year-old Nico Storm and his father Willem roam a nearly empty South Africa in search of a place to rebuild society, and settle at the old Vanderkloof, now called Amanzi, with a group of survivors.
UJ-prys 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Book of Weeping”
Ryk Hattingh · 59 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:An interwoven text that moves between the present in New Zealand and a childhood on the East Rand in the 1960s, asking who the child on the stoep was, and who Outa Toon was, the man seen only from behind in a photograph with father and sons.
UJ-prys 2017 · Shortlist
Tom Dreyer · 44 when first published
Novel · 240 pages
AI-generated summary:After his father’s death, Gilbert du Toit sees strange visions, contour lines of light and fleeting shoals of fish, and follows them across the Karoo towards Cape Town, falling in with the Howlers, three former convicts touring country towns with trumpet, violin and guitar.
UJ-prys 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Brandwater Basin”
Novel · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In the Brandwater Basin in the eastern Free State during the Anglo-Boer War, General Marthinus Prinsloo surrenders with more than 4,000 men in July 1900, amid rumours of treason, while Boer women hide in mountain caves to escape the concentration camps.
UJ-prys 2016 · Shortlist
Vlam in die sneeu
Nonfiction · 450 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:The love letters of two writers who met in April 1963, more than two hundred of them, from her telegram thanking him for flowers to his last letter in April 1965: one of South Africa’s most moving love affairs, published half a century later.
UJ-prys 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dark Stream”
Nonfiction · 608 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In 1896, shortly before the Anglo-Boer War, the young newspaperman Eugène Marais leaves the Transvaal for five years in London. This book uncovers what he was doing there during the war, which had much more to do with Lord Milner and the Randlords than one might imagine.
UJ-prys 2016 · Shortlist
Vlakwater
Ingrid Winterbach · 67 when first published
Novel · 272 pages
AI-generated summary:After his relationship breaks up, the artist Niek Steyn settles in Cape Town and befriends Marthinus Scheepers when one of his pigs lands in Niek’s garden. Then his lodger Charelle Koopman disappears, and a well-off artist makes a suspicious offer on his house.
UJ-prys 2015 · Shortlist
Mede-wete
Antjie Krog · 62 when first published
Poetry · 128 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems on conscience, memory and language, on a shared awareness of guilt, on the relation between self and other, and on land and the ownership of land.
UJ-prys 2015 · Shortlist
’n Duisend stories oor Johannesburg
Harry Kalmer · 58 when first published
Novel · 329 pages
AI-generated summary:Interwoven stories of Johannesburg people, emigrants, returnees and those who never left, through the twentieth century, from a concentration-camp tent in Turffontein to a couple whose love is illegal and a xenophobic murder in 2008.
UJ-prys 2015 · Shortlist
Kerneels Breytenbach · 62 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Historical, Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:Inspired by a meeting in 1940 between D.F. Malan and a German spy, Mrs Thyra Denk: a novel of forbidden passion and political intrigue.
UJ-prys 2014 · Shortlist
Wolf, wolf
Novel · 272 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Mattheus Duiker, son of Benjamin Duiker, once the owner of Duiker’s Motors, opens the gate of the Cape Town mansion to his lover Jack, disguised as a wolf. A story of father and son, and of a man the past has ill equipped for a fast-changing order.
UJ-prys 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Yo-Yo”
Etienne van Heerden · 59 when first published
Novel · 385 pages
AI-generated summary:In Paternoster, where the grey-haired former yo-yo showman Ludo Loeloeraai has come to rest at the end of a long road, Snaartjie Windvogel arrives from Matjiesfontein and crosses paths with Eenslie Maree, a newly qualified naval cadet.
UJ-prys 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Red Everyman”
Novel · 285 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A fictional life of Bram Fischer, Afrikaner communist and struggle hero, from a childhood of dreams and visions in Bloemfontein to life underground in disguise and in prison.
UJ-prys 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“This Person”
Poetry · 49 pages
AI-generated summary:Small, economical poems, intimate studies and personal notes that set language-bound humans against the splendour of wordless nature, in a calmer, more direct voice of simplicity and stillness.
UJ-prys 2013 · Shortlist
Philida
Novel · 320 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The young slave Philida walks from Franschhoek to Stellenbosch to lodge a complaint with the Protector of Slaves against her master, Cornelis Brink, who wants to sell her after she has borne his son Frans four children. Frans had promised to buy her freedom.
UJ-prys 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Farewell, My Slightly Tarnished Hero”
Poetry · 110 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems on the ties between people and the cosmos and between people, on possession and loss, frailty and healing, closing with verses of farewell to a stained hero in which loneliness, grief and death take centre stage.
UJ-prys 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Our Fathers”
Novel · 509 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A house robbery in a millionaires’ suburb of Stellenbosch goes wrong, and Captain Albertus Beeslaar, visiting the town, is drawn into the investigation against his will, while Sergeant Johannes Ghaap searches Soweto for a woman and child kidnapped in a hijacking.
UJ-prys 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“For the Thought of Yellow”
Poetry
AI-generated summary:Poems dedicated to the sun, praised through the yellows of earth and sky as the source of life, that speak of women’s lives in faraway places, from ancient Greece to Tibet, and keep coming home to the grain fields of the Overberg.
UJ-prys 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Picnic at Hangklip”
Kerneels Breytenbach · 59 when first published
Novel · Crime
AI-generated summary:Joshua Gumbo, a Zambian in a Johannesburg crime syndicate, accidentally shoots the parents of the young lawyer Sonja Griessel while stealing their car. She starts afresh in the Overstrand, and he follows her to the Cape to get back the mojo her kiss took from him.
UJ-prys 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Circus Boers”
Novel · 379 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In St. Louis, General Piet Cronjé re-enacts his greatest humiliation, his surrender at Paardeberg, twice a day in a Boer War show staged by the circus owner Frank Fillis for the crowds of the world exhibition.
UJ-prys 2011 · Shortlist
Novel · 317 pages
AI-generated summary:Five narrators tell of one weekend on Dwaalpoort, a supposedly paradisal hunting farm, where a judge must find his trophy, his wife was once a stripper, and the farmer Henning distrusts Bullet, childhood friend of the previous owner’s daughter Rentia.
UJ-prys 2011 · Shortlist
Die benederyk
Ingrid Winterbach · 62 when first published
Novel · 320 pages