‘Our box met with a bit of a red wine incident …’ Joanne wrote close to midnight yesterday and sent the picture above. I don’t know details of the ‘incident’ – yet! – but I just love it that this was my confirmation of our incredible win last night at the HSS Awards! I was interviewing Tan Twan Eng (what a pleasure that had been!) earlier in the day and had a prior evening commitment, so I could not fly up for the awards ceremony, but Joanne was there to represent us. It was ‘like the Oscars’, according to her, and WE WON!
It is such a joy that we were recognised with the HSS Award for Best Fiction Edited Volume for our Short.Sharp.Stories anthology, FLUID: The Freedom to Be. I have the photograph, but it is still difficult to grasp that this wonderful thing happened to us. And it happened at the same time when Dawn Garisch won the HSS Award for Best Fiction Short Stories for her collection, What Remains. And Frankie Murrey won the HSS Award for Best Emerging Author in the Fiction Category for her debut, Everyone Dies. The stories we tell and nourish and publish are spreading their wings and doing remarkable things!
Wow. Just wow!
For obvious reasons, I chose to speak about a few of the women in my life who shaped my creativity and were instrumental in paving my way towards a career in writing, editing and publishing. It was impossible to honour all of them in a short time, but these are the women who featured in my talk yesterday: my grandmother, Babcia Marysia, and my Mom, both of them nurtured my creativity in indirect but significant ways; Mrs Nellie Fahy, the librarian who awakened my passion for reading; Nadine Gordimer, whose writing brought me to South Africa for the first time; Maureen Isaacson, who first gave me the opportunity to hone my craft as a book reviewer when she was book page editor of the Sunday Independent; Lyndall Gordon, whose work and friendship showed me how to continue being a writer in the world when I was doubting that I could; Rachel Zadok, who believed in me as an editor and through work kept me sane when my world lost nearly all connection to sanity; and Joanne Hichens, who was a stranger when I asked her to visit me in an hour of utter despair nearly five years ago, but we became friends and are now co-editors of an anthology of short stories we published together: HAIR: Weaving and Unpicking Stories of Identity.
During the book club reviewing session, I also briefly spoke about the book I had finished reading that morning: Desiree-Anne Martin’s remarkable 
“There is nothing boring about this anthology!” writes Consuelo Roland (author of The Good Cemetery Guide, Lady Limbo and Wolf Trap) on Goodreads, and continues: “Many of the stories are partially embedded in time and space against the background of South Africa’s apartheid legacy, but there is also spontaneity, humour and mystery, and a sense of how one might wriggle out from under the weight of our hair (the burdens of past and present). As the first brilliant story ‘The Collection’ by Alex Latimer reminds us hair is something dead and yet it makes us alive and present. Other stories that stayed with me (yours may well be different, this collection is that good!): ‘Before We Go’, ‘Spa Ritual’, ‘The Wisdom of Sunday’, ‘A Woman’s Glory’, ‘At Length, Hair’s Breath,’, ‘That Famous Winter Brown’, ‘Let The Music Play On’, ‘Reunion’. And then there’s the soulful, beautifully written (not an unnecessary word) ‘Lila’, by Bongani Kona, that felt like someone had thrown a brick at my chest so that I could hardly breathe with the sadness of it…”
Karina Magdalena 