English Academy of Southern Africa Announces English Academy Gold Medal for Robin Malan

The Council of the English Academy of Southern Africa is pleased to announce that Robin Malan is the winner of the 2014 Academy's Gold Medal in recognition for his services to English over a long career in education, theatre and publishing. Malan was presented with the award in Cape Town on Wednesday.

Malan began his career in education: firstly, at Cape Town High School as a senior English and History teacher. He was also responsible for the school's theatre activities and ran yearly drama winter schools for students. After that, he spent about fifteen years in Swaziland as Head of English, Head of Hostel Staff, Assistant Head and International Baccalaureate Examinations Co-Ordinator at the Waterford Kamhlaba United World College. Then, he returned to Cape Town to lecture in the Department of Drama at Stellenbosch University and to tutor in the English Department of the University of Cape Town.

Malan has published widely - close to 60 titles - both as author and editor, using predominantly southern African publishers to do so. He has written nine novels, an award-winning play, and edited more than 20 poetry anthologies, short stories, and plays for adults and children. Despite his own literary achievements, Robin's most significant contribution to English is his life-long, unwavering encouragement of young people to appreciate and to produce English literature in southern Africa.

His pioneering anthologies, INSCAPES (first published in 1969), NEW INSCAPES and WORLDSCAPES made an 'impact on generations of school students' and 'introduced children to the literature of the world, and of southern Africa', according to Megan Hall, poet and publishing manager at Oxford University Press (OUP). She adds that some of the literature in these anthologies was familiar and school-going children could easily identify with it and some was 'foreign and strange'. Writer, Dr. Beverley Naidoo says that Robin often used his literature anthologies to introduce the racially-segregated, insular youth of southern Africa to each other and to 'people from elsewhere'.

In 1967, Robin was a founding editor of ENGLISH ALIVE, an anthology of writing from students in grade 8 to 12 and an important instrument of support for young peoples' writing in English in southern Africa. Robin edited the anthology intermittently for twenty years and since 2013 has been back in the editor's chair. Dr Malcolm Venter, National Chairperson of the South African Council of English Education (SACEE), under whose auspices ENGLISH ALIVE is published, expressed his delight at the news: 'We are very proud that someone from SACEE who has been a longstanding editor of ENGLISH ALIVE, is to receive the Gold Medal Award, especially since SACEE is celebrating its Diamond Jubilee this year'.

Terrill Nicolay, Western Cape Chair of SACEE, added that publication of poetry or prose in ENGLISH ALIVE is 'one of the most prestigious accolades for an aspirant young writer'. Nicolay goes on, 'Over the years, ENGLISH ALIVE has become ... representative of the wide diversity of South African writing ... Robin has been instrumental in extending the range of submissions, as he has actively sought work from schools in townships and rural areas, and among those for whom English is not necessarily a home language. He has ... kept in contact with promising young writers ... Many have gone on to pursue creative careers, such as novelist and Caine Prize short-story writer Henrietta Rose-Innes, Fleur du Cap Award playwright Nicholas Spagnoletti (LONDON ROAD), and playwrights Amy Jephta and Nadia Davids.'

In 2005, Robin established Junkets Publishers, a small, independent publishing house. It specialises in publishing playscripts by unknown playwrights, offering them for sale at performances. Megan Hall says, 'Since this is a genre that is seldom published, this is indeed a service both to playwrights and to theatre patrons'. Pieter Jacobs, CEO of the Arts & Culture Trust notes, 'Junkets Publishers has significantly contributed to the archive of South African plays.'