“Bridling is an impressive achievement, a triumph of language, storytelling and risk-taking while maintaining a tightly controlled narrative about women who rebel”, said judging chair and author Chika Unigwe. “It embodies the spirit of the Caine prize, which is to celebrate the richness and diversity of short stories by African writers.”
Nadia Davids has won the 2024 caine prize
“I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read”.
The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found a good position as a personal maid to the solitary and frenetic Mrs. Hattingh. The older woman’s beautiful home is not far from The Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents and siblings, but on her first day she learns she must stay with Mrs. Hattingh every night—not to leave but for one Sunday every fortnight. She soon finds company in the spirits of the house, which decays despite Mrs. Hattingh’s best efforts to keep the home intact in advance of her son’s visit from London. He, unlike the sons of many of Mrs. Hattingh’s friends, was lucky enough to survive the war.
A few weeks into Soraya’s employment, Mrs. Hattingh offers to help her stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya speaks and Mrs. Hattingh writes—a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.
A gothic psychological drama, Cape Fever is an unexpected and bewitching novel, which lays bare the wickedness of colonialism while weaving an uncanny tapestry of love, obsession, and grief, in and between the spirit world.
Davids’ new novel CAPE FEVER, (publishers: UK: Scribner US: Simon & Schuster) will be out in Winter 2026.
“[London, UK] – The Caine Prize for African Writing, an esteemed annual award honouring outstanding African writers, is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2024 edition. The five shortlisted stories were carefully selected from a pool of 320 entries originating from 28 African countries. […].
“How do we navigate life? They [the writers] explore this question with empathy, thoughtfulness, humor, and prose that is both sublime and accessible. […]We are incredibly proud of this outstanding shortlist and our honorable mention. Congratulations to all the writers!”
Nadia Davids has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing:
“I wanted to […] respond to various performance pieces I’d seen that staged either race or gender or re-enacted historical ethnographic practices — or did all three!
I’d been troubled more than once by works that declared that they were taking up these issues to dismantle them, but to my mind, seemed to replicate in structure and meaning what they said they were critiquing.
And the longer I thought about those works or spoke to performers who were in them, the more I returned to how power manifests in the rehearsal room and on the stage, how it’s negotiated, what the terms are, what kinds of systems outside the room are replicated inside of it.
[…]
I developed a somewhat naive narrator who is enamoured with the “genius” of a smooth-talking all-powerful male director.
It’s a punishing, extractive process but the narrator eventually forges solidarity with the other women performers and finds herself in the psychic life of the artworks.”
(Image: Paula Rego, Good Dog, 1994. (Davids looked at several paintings as inspiration for the short story. This one, by artist Paula Rego, prompts a key turning point for the narrator).
Prizes, perceptions and plays: Nadia Davids on being shortlisted for the Caine Prize and the genesis of ‘Bridling’:
“Plays are an astonishingly intimate way of experiencing art and time: we pay to sit in the dark with a group of strangers, and together, we are bound by an unspoken social contract to be (mostly) silent. We collectively agree to suspend disbelief as we watch other human beings pretend to go through all sorts of things and feelings. We watch actors speak, shout, weep, laugh, rage—and sometimes we feel those things along with them. It is an extraordinarily strange way to spend a couple of hours. It is also one of the most ancient ways to spend a couple of hours. Liveness and live performance are inherently risky, and so the possibility of a ‘surprise’ is always lurking, even the most well-rehearsed show is subject to the human. Something can go wrong—lines can be forgotten, a cue can be missed, or a light can fuse. Conversely, something deep and unexpected might connect and flow from character to actor to audience, creating meaning together. That feeling of being moved by a work of art can be as surprising as something going ‘wrong’. In part, that possibility of surprise is what makes theatre so potent” writes Davids.