What’s as shy as a leopard, sharp as a scalpel and helps wag the tale? A fine editor, of course.
Hottish off the press, the shortlist for the Sunday Times Literary Awards represents a striking line-up of contenders for this year’s R200,000 prize pool. Drawing plaudits such as “scholarly”, “monumentally annotated” and “finely observed writing”, the 10 shortlisted books range from Francois Smith’s The Camp Whore (Tafelberg) – the true story of an Anglo-Boer War rape survivor, to Thandeka Gqubule’s No Longer Whispering to Power – The Story of Thuli Madonsela (Jonathan Ball).
At least since I helped edit the long- and short-list announcements about a decade ago, their time-honoured criteria remain unchanged.
This year the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize category once again called for a “novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction”. Alan Paton Award judges looked for the “illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity”.
Prestigious touchstones that only eminently deserving writers could satisfy.
But – in general publishing terms – let’s not discount the role of good editing, which may be overlooked more often than not, even at major industry events.
On an otherwise impressive line-up at this weekend’s Franschhoek Literary Festival, there seems to be not a single talk delving into the editor’s craft, the spine to any good book. (Sorry. My pet chameleon lives off terrible, terrible puns like normal Old World lizards thrive on crickets. She would also like to challenge the Lit Fest organisers to include more editorial talks on next year’s bill.)
There are, admittedly, different schools of thought on whether the literary spotlight should even hint at an editor’s outlines: in his fine Guardian blog post on the definition of good editing, former Man Booker Prize judge Rick Gekoski shares his fascinating discovery from the biography of illustrious publisher Victor Gollancz.
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