Last weekend, the South African Literary Awards were hosted at the University of the Free State.
Sonja Loots walked away with the K.Sello Duiker Memorial Award for her historical novel, Sirkusboere. The novel tells the tale of how former Boer fighters participated in Fillis’s circus.
The plot is two-fold, on the one hand the story of a people who turned their worst trauma into a circus, on the other hand the story of someone who knew how to exploit the human appetite for spectacular violence.
With much originality she develops this material to deliver not only a gripping historical novel, but also a commentary on current life in South Africa.
Sonja Loots was born on 6 August, 1972, at Kimberley. She studied Afrikaans and Nederlands at the universities of Stellenbosch (BA, cum laude, 1993) and Rhodes (BA Hons, MA, both cum laude).
As an Honours student she was awarded an M-Net Bursary for Fiction. She studied Creative Writing with Etienne van Heerden.
Sonja has held teaching posts at Rhodes University, Pretoria Technikon and the University of Johannesburg and worked as a reporter at Die Burger. In 1999, she moved to Johannesburg to work for De Kat and as books editor for Rapport.
Sonja also wrote countless scripts for the 7de Laan television series.
In 2005 she was awarded the SA Books Journalist of the Year Award.
February 2009: After three years life in England, Sonja joined Random House SA as General Manager of Marketing.
She currently holds a teaching position at the University of Cape Town.
Picture credit: www.uct.ac.za
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