UCT scholar among winners

Word perfect: Prof David Schalkwyk receives the Thomas Pringle Prize from Barbara Basel, president of the English Academy of Southern Africa.

UCT's Professor David Schalkwyk has won the 2006 Thomas Pringle Award for best literary article from the English Academy of Southern Africa.

Schalkwyk, based in the Department of English Language and Literature, picked up the prize for his article Race, Body and Language in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays, published in the journal English Studies in Africa in 2004. In the piece, Schalkwyk tackled the thorny issue of Shakespeare's assumed - by modern-day scholars - take on the racial politics of his time.

"The article, which is written in Schalkwyk's characteristically fine hand provides an important and necessary counterweight to some of the more radical perspectives and claims presented in Shakespearean literary criticism over the past decade or so," said Professor Stanley Ridge of the University of the Western Cape in his citation.

Schalkwyk received the award at the academy's seminar at UCT on 3 November, held in collaboration with the English department.

At the same meeting, the academy also awarded its Olive Schreiner Prize for prose to Russel Brownlee for his Garden of the Plagues, the Thomas Pringle Prize for reviews to Michiel Heyns for his contributions to the Sunday Independent, and the Thomas Pringle Award for short stories to Ken Barris for his The Quick Brown Fox.