Jacques Coetzee has won the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for a debut collection in English with his book An Illuminated Darkness, published by uHlanga in 2020.

The Ingrid Jonker Prize is awarded in alternate years to the best debut collection published in South Africa in English or Afrikaans. Twelve entries were received for the 2022 prize, which was judged by Malika Ndlovu, Ken Barris and Arja Salafranca. Judges of the Ingrid Jonker prize are unaware of each other’s identities until judging is complete.

One of the judges praised the meditative tone of Coetzee’s collection, pointing out that Coetzee “does not strive for technical effects, but seems more concerned to express delicate, deeply felt intangibles of life, silence, death, love – often in the context of blindness and the pain and anger, however sublimated, that goes with it.”

Another judge observed that the poet “writes with a musician’s ear and heart’s depths of listening that consciously unfolds the lines of the poems, particularly the shifts in rhythm.”

This is the third Ingrid Jonker Prize won by uHlanga authors for books in English, following Thabo Jijana’s win in 2016 for Failing Maths and My Other Crimes, and Saaleha Idrees Bamjee in 2020 for Zikr.

Coetzee’s collection is currently available in print format from all good bookstores in South Africa, in Braille at all libraries for the print-disabled in South Africa, and as a free audiobook.

Congratulations to Jacques, and to the other shortlisted writers, Dimaketso Sedite and Sue Woodward. Thank you to the judges and committee members for the prize.