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The
2007 Award
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Praying Mantis by André Brink
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Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| In
his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the
southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar,
fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of a woman,
the soap-boiler Anna, and particularly under the influence of the great
Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, whose
own early profligate life dramatically changed course after a tragedy in
Holland inspired him to dedicate himself to the abused native peoples of
Southern Africa, Cupido is then made the first Khoi or 'Hottentot' missionary
ordained at the Cape of Good Hope. Received into the fold of the Church,
Cupido passionately turns against all his early beliefs. After being drawn
into the fierce struggle between the missionaries and the Dutch colonists,
he rises to some prominence and is appointed as missionary in a remote and
arid region in the North-western Cape. But this also marks the beginning of his decline, as the Society abandons him to his fate. One by one, the members of his congregation disappear into the desert, so that in the end, abandoned even by his wife and children, he is left to preach to the stones and thorn trees and tortoises, returning to the dream-world of his people. In a heady mixture of comedy and tragedy, the real and the magical, and immersed in the ancient, earthy, African world of magic and dreams, Praying Mantis explores through the historical figure of Cupido Cockroach the origins of racial tension in the shadowlands between myth and history. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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André Brink is the author of fifteen novels in English, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire and, most recently, The Other Side of Silence. He has won South Africa's most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into thirty languages. André Brink is Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. |
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