Accolades for Nelson Mandela University Professor

Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, Mandela University Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination, has been awarded a prestigious international award.
The Board of Advisors of the James Currey Society in co-operation with the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, has approved Prof Gqola as the James Currey Lifetime Achievement Awardee for 2023.

The award appreciates and recognises important work in literary criticism and African literature.

“I am honoured that my scholarship has attracted this kind of recognition, not just at home but across the world,” said Prof Gqola.

“Prof James Currey is such a foundational figure intellectually and as a publisher of the canonical African Writer Series at Heinemann, which was crucial to the emergence and circulation of African writers who are now household names.

“To be a recipient of an award named after him, with his blessing, is humbling but also deeply encouraging.”

Inasmuch as the award is an accolade for her own work, Prof Gqola also hopes that it contributes to supporting the “wonderful project of Revitalising the Humanities” underway at Mandela University.

Prof Gqola will receive the award during the James Currey Literary Festival on September 3, 2023 at Weston Library, University of Oxford. She will also deliver the Special James Currey Lecture at Oxford on her visit.