Pretoria - As part of its investment in South Africa’s heritage, Avbob this week announced 11 talented poets – one for each of the country’s official languages – as winners of its 2022 poetry competition.
The winners were announced during a gala event and prize-giving ceremony, which culminated in a celebration of the power of poetry to bring people together, to build community and to offer uplifting words in times of loss.
Avbob chief executive Carl van der Riet, in his keynote address, described poetry as an art that had a unique ability to bypass the rational mind and logical intellectual process and to speak directly to the heart.
“We have a rich heritage of poetry in South Africa. So as we each observe Heritage Day, I would like to encourage all of us to also remember this unique part of our heritage which has served as such a beacon of hope and inspiration for people,” he said.
Each winner received a prize which included R10 000 cash, R2 500 book voucher, and an elegant trophy. Each guest also received a copy of the annual anthology containing the winning poems, I wish I’d said… Vol. 5, which was launched at the event.
“The support of mother-tongue voices has been a primary aim of the Avbob Poetry Project since the beginning and so the editors were encouraged that 65% of all poems entered were written in South Africa’s vernacular languages.”
Van der Riet said that the Avbob Poetry Library now contained more than 17 000 poems, each of which earned the poet a usage fee of R300.
That amounted to over R5.2m spent on building a cultural repository of poems available to those who needed words of comfort and consolation.
The top six poems in each language appear in the anthology, accompanied by an English translation. A selection of commissioned poems and four Khoisan poems from the Bleek and Lloyd collection round out the anthology.
This comprehensive collection was compiled by the editor-in-chief of the Avbob Poetry Competition, Johann de Lange, and the esteemed Xitsonga academic, literary translator and founding chairperson of the PAN South African Language Board, Professor Nxalati CP Golele.
“Poetry bears witness to our lives, our loves and our losses. It helps us traverse major transitions, giving us the words to name the feelings and to tame the emotions.
“It helps us to fathom what we must live for, define what we must protect, and focus on what we must promote in a changing world,” De Lange said.
This year’s winners are: Clinton V du Plessis (Afrikaans); Letitia Matthews (English); Nkosinathi Mduduzi Jiyana (isiNdebele); Sipho Kekezwa (isiXhosa); Nomkelemane Langa (isiZulu); Pabalelo Maphutha (Sepedi); Kgobani Mohapi (Sesotho); Molebatsi Joseph Bosilong (Setswana); Prisca Nkosi (Siswati); Mashudu Stanley Ramukhuba (Tshivenda); and, Pretty Shiburi (Xitsonga).
Pretoria News