Q&As: Nadia Davids’ ‘Bridling’ – on the Caine Prize Shortlist 2024

By Africa in Words on 7 February , 2025 • ( 0 )

With AiW Guest: Nadia Davids.

AiW note – on the 2024 edition of our, now annual, AiW Caine Prize series…

Today is the last in our ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As, and the final of our “twinned” Writer-Publisher sets — here with writer Nadia Davids, shortlisted for her story ‘Bridling’, whose responses are coupled with those from publisher Gerald Maa, editor and director of The Georgia Review, the magazine that featured ‘Bridling’ in 2023.

You can find Gerald’s, along with all the complementing responses — same Qs, different As — running across the full series here.

To note, as with our previous coverage of the Prize, we spoke with all our interviewees in the series before the winner was announced on September 17th. But we’re delighted to take this space and congratulate Nadia as the winner of the 2024 Caine Prize!

AiW: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing, Nadia. Thank you for your story, ‘Bridling’, and for talking with us.

Nadia Davids: Thank you for the wishes and for your focused support of African writing.

Could we open with a bit about some of the “other lives” or pre-lives of your Caine Prize shortlisted story, perhaps something that our readers might not yet know (or that they should, or need to know) about it?

‘Bridling’ represents something of a departure for me: I am, with very few exceptions, usually wholly concerned with South Africa, with Cape Town, with my city’s many histories, peoples and struggles, specifically with Islam at the Cape and my community’s experiences of dispossession, belonging, exclusion and inclusion pre, under, and post Apartheid. But this story, told from the perspective of a young woman performer about the audition, rehearsal process and performance of an experimental work, is not set in any particular place. It’s very much about the intensity, the heat of making a creative work and the struggle for agency and power in that process.

When the idea first came to me in 2020, I envisioned it as a performance piece – very meta! I wrote up a short text and shared it with Jay Pather who then began a workshopping process with two performers who played the actor and the director. That text was more like a freeform poem – impressionistic, suggestive, elliptical. Some really interesting stuff began to emerge from the rehearsal process but we had to put it aside – other work projects needed our attention. In 2022, I picked the text up again with a much stronger sense of how it would work as a short story; the actor as narrator’s voice solidified, as did the director – smooth-talking, clever, persuasive, wily – and then suddenly, this wonderful character, an older woman performer I named ‘Medusa’, appeared. And I knew also that I wanted to somehow draw on representations of women in Western Art. With those elements in place, the story began to take shape. I didn’t expect the ending, where things take a very surreal turn!

Could you tell us a bit about your (other) work — your own writing and/or other kinds of work, roles, or the more general and different sorts of professional hats you wear – and how it might play out in terms of your involvement with short story writing from the continent?

I work across multiple genres as a playwright, novelist, essayist and academic. I taught in universities for a long stretch, in the UK and in South Africa. I’m not in an academic post at the moment as I’ve taken some time away from teaching to focus on my creative work. And I’ve just stepped down as President of PEN South Africa. I’d say that my primary involvement with short story writing across the continent is as a reader. It’s a form I love. It strikes me as needing the intensity of a play – best read in one sitting – and the complexity of a novel. It’s a really difficult form that promises challenges as a writer and much pleasure as a reader. I’ve been reading The Caine Prize shortlist since the award’s inception – it’s a treasure trove of African fiction, a truly remarkable, diverse assembly of works.

Looking to you as a reader, is there a serendipitous or interesting, perhaps even uncanny, book / text related thing that’s happened to you? Perhaps a happy, weird accident that has occurred around books or writing that you can share with us; or a strange, significant – outrageous, even – thing you have done, or would do, because of, or for a book (text / story / piece of writing)?

What a lovely question! And yes, there’ve been so many strange co-incidences… The one I’m thinking of now is very small but wonderful in its own way: in 2008 I wrote and directed a play set in preremoval District Six about the anti-Apartheid community organiser, Cisse Gool. There was a brief scene from her childhood where she speaks to an immigrant from Russia. He owns a corner shop and I named him, at complete random, ‘Mr Latsky’. It was the briefest exchange, two lines at most. At the opening night, two people (who I knew by a different surname), came up to me incredibly excited that I’d included their grandfather ‘Mr Latsky and his shop’ from Russia who’d lived in District Six during that era in the play.

I think of these moments of serendipity as being a reminder that there’s a realm beyond the always explicable.

What would you say is the best investment you’ve made in your professional self / selves, and/or the most valued advice you’ve received about navigating your industry (or industries)?

It’s so different for different writers – there are so many forces that are out of our control. But the two things I think we can do are: 1) keep writing, keep showing up, keep hewing close to the work that holds meaning for you; 2) find and forge community with other writers or readers who appreciate what you’re trying to do, people who will be equal parts supportive and honest about your work. Both those things, diligent writing and building a community of trust, require serious time and effort — deep investment.

Finally, how can our blog, books, reading, and online communities best offer support for your work in African writing?

I think you’re doing it already – providing this space, asking thoughtful questions, engaging with the work. Thank you!

Nadia Davids is a South African writer, theatre-maker and scholar. Her plays (At Her Feet, What Remains, Hold Still) have been staged throughout Southern Africa and in Europe. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for Pan-African Etisalat Prize for Literature. Nadia’s short fiction and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Zyzzyva Magazine. She’s held residencies at Hedgebrook, Art Omi and The Women’s Project, and was a 2023 Aspen Words Writer. Nadia has taught at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Cape Town and is the President Emeritus of PEN South Africa.

Nadia’s latest novel, Cape Fever, will publish in December 2025 with Simon and Schuster.

Continuing our attention to the various routes of African literary production and their interactions with prize cultures, today’s twinned ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ Q&A is with publisher of ‘Bridling’ in The Georgia Review (2023), Gerald Maa. You can catch it, with more of our Caine Prize coverage here now.

Read Nadia’s winning! story, ‘Bridling’, along with all the stories shortlisted for 2024, via the Caine Prize website, or by clicking direct on ‘Shortlist…The Stories’ image below.

For more on the 2024 shortlist and the changes to the format of the Prize, looking ahead to its anniversary edition in 2025, visit: https://www.caineprize.com/.

Our ‘Words On / Caine Prize’ 2024 Shortlist Q&As form part of an extended Caine Prize series for its 2024 run. Moving with changes to the Caine Prize announcement format, the series both looks back over the 2024 Prize and ahead to the Prize’s 25th anniversary.

Next week, we’ll be running one-a-day reviews of each of the shortlisted stories, guest authored for us by critics based on the continent, and commissioned by our own Wesley Macheso; we’re looking forward to sharing an insightful interview in the following week with the current Chair of the Caine Prize, Ellah Wakatama, in conversation with our resident publishing and prize industry specialist, Doseline Kiguru...

With congrats and thanks to all our Q&A Caine Prize Shortlist 2024 participants; our reviewers; and special thanks to Ajoke Bodunde and Ellah Wakatama at the Caine Prize.