UCT Book Award
The UCT Book Award recognises the publication of outstanding books written by members of staff.
Published works in any category, including monographs, textbooks, novels, collections and popularisations, are eligible for consideration by the Book Award Committee.
Members of the university community may nominate books they consider to bring credit to UCT by virtue of their contribution to scholarly literature, education, science and the arts.
The award, which is presented annually, carries a
UCT Book Award 2011
 Professor JC (Kay) de Villiers, who formerly held the Helen and Morris Mauerberger Chair of Neurosurgery at UCT, won the Book Award for his work, Healers, Helpers and Hospitals: A history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War. In this two-volume work, the fields of history and medicine converge as it focuses on that far-reaching conflict, fought at a time when war killed more people through disease than through wounds.
Read Monday Paper article. |
UCT Book Award 2010
 Kit Vaughan, emeritus professor of biomedical engineering and director of UCT spin-off company CapeRay, won the UCT Book Award for 2010 for Imagining the Elephant: a Biography of Allan Macleod Cormack, his ode to the South African-born Nobel laureate.
Cormack, a 'lowly' UCT-trained physicist, was co-winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scanner. His work also inspired a new generation of medical scientists, including Vaughan, who established a medical imaging research group at UCT in 2000, just two years after Cormack's death, in the latter's honour. Read Monday Paper article. |
UCT Book Award 2009
The 2009 Book Award was awarded to two UCT academics.
 Prof Pippa Skotnes of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts in the Faculty of Humanities was awarded the prize for her work Claim to the Country: The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd.
The book and accompanying DVD brings together most of an archive on the San people created by philologist Wilhelm Bleek and linguist and folklorist Lucy Lloyd in the late 1800s. Claim to the Country was described by one reviewer as "hauntingly beautiful, deeply informed, and poignantly moving". Anthropologist David Lewis-Williams says the book is "surely the most amazing ethnographic source in the world". Read the Monday Paper article. |
 Prof Nigel Penn of the Department of Historical Studies the Faculty of Humanities was recognised for his book Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 19th Century.
In the book, released in 2006, Penn resurrects the history of the Northern Cape frontier. Relying primarily on records of the Dutch East India Company, he argues that the Northern Cape played a crucial role in shaping the attitudes and institutions that contributed to the subjugation of the Khoisan people. The move into the interior by the Dutch colonists had by the end of the eighteenth century, says Penn, either reduced these herders and hunters into an underclass in the colonial world, or expelled them beyond it. Read Daily News article. |
UCT Book Award 2008
Dr Peter Bruyns, a mathematician specialising in the theory of permutation groups, received the 2008 Book Award for his two-volume work, Stapeliads of Southern Africa and Madagascar.
The work is a culmination of his 25 years of research, trekking remoter parts of the globe in search of a group of fleshy-stemmed succulents known as Stapeliads.
Stapeliads are succulents with striking, pentagonal-shaped flowers belonging to the family Apocynaceae, quite plentiful in the drier parts of Africa but generally considered very difficult to identify.
Read the Monday Paper article.
UCT Book Award 2007
The UCT Book Award for 2007 was presented to Professor Bill Nasson of the historical studies department for his book Britannia's Empire - Making a British World (Tempus, 2004).
The book has been described as "packed with elegant and concise argument, original insights and what can only be described as Nassonian witticisms".
This is his second such award.
Nasson, who describes himself as a writer of history, not a historian who writes, won his first UCT Book Award in 1993 for Abraham Esau's War: A black South African War in the Cape 1899-1902.
Read the Monday Paper article.
UCT Book Award 2006
The 2006 UCT Book Award was presented to Professor Peter Knox-Shaw, an honorary research associate in the English department, for his work Jane Austen and the Enlightenment.
Knox-Shaw was a full-time member and senior lecturer of the English department from 1975 to 1991. He was made an honorary research associate of the department in 1994.
His aim in writing the book was twofold. He wanted to demonstrate how responsive Jane Austen was to the deep social changes that took place during her lifetime, changes that now lie at the foundation of the modern world, and also to reassert her presence as a liberal and progressive figure in it.
Read the Monday Paper article.
UCT Book Award 2005
The 2005 UCT Book Award was presented to Professor Nicoli Nattrass for her work The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa.
The book has been widely acclaimed as it presents the interface between the moral and economic facets of AIDS in South Africa.
Nattrass, who heads the AIDS and Society Research Unit (commerce faculty) in the Centre for Social Science Research, is hopeful that the award will boost similar academic output in her resident faculty.
Read the Monday Paper article.
| Year | Author | Title |
| 2009 | P Skotnes (Humanities) | The Archive of Willem Bleek and Lucy Lloyd |
| 2009 | N Penn (Humanities) | The Forgotten Frontier |
| 2008 | Dr P Bruyns (Science) | Stapeliads of Southern Africa and Madagascar |
| 2007 | B Nasson (Humanities) | Britannia's Empire - Making a British World |
| 2006 | P Knox-Shaw (Humanities) | Jane Austen and the Enlightenment |
| 2005 | N Nattrass (Commerce) | The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa |
| 2004 | MS Blackman (Law) RD Jooste (Law) GK Everingham (Law) |
Companies Act: Commentary |
| 2003 | T D Noakes (Health Scienses) | Lore of Running |
| 2002 | J Glazewski (Marine & Environmental Law) | Environmental Law in South Africa |
| 2001 | NG Penn (Humanities) | Rogues, Rebels and Runaways |
| 2000 | J Higgins (English Language and Literature) | Raymond Williams. Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism |
| 1999 | M Mamdani (Humanities) | Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism |
| 1998 | M S Blackman (Law) | Companies (in Law of South Africa, first re-issue Vol 4, parts 1, 2 and 3) |
| J V Bickford-Smith (Arts) | Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1985 - 1902 | |
| 1997 | B Warner (Science) | Cataclysmic Variable Stars |
| 1996 | D Coplan (Social Science and Humanities) | In the Time of the Cannibals |
| P Harries (Arts) | Work, Culture and Identity | |
| M Shain (Arts) | The Roots of Anti-Semitism in South Africa | |
| T Rajna (Music) | Harp Concerto | |
| 1995 |  |
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| 1994 | G M Branch (Science); C L Griffiths (Science); L Beckley and M L Branch | Two Oceans: A Guide to the Marine Life of Southern Africa |
| 1993 | D Chidester (Social Science & Humanities) | Shots in the Street |
| 1993 | W Nasson (Arts) | Ebram Esau's War |
| 1992 | P Skotnes (Fine Art & Architecture); S Watson (Arts); J Parkington (Arts) and N Penn (Arts) | Sound from the Thinking Strings |
| 1991 | R Mendelsohn (Arts) | Sammy Marks, "The Uncrowned King of the Transvaal" |
| 1990 | J M Coetzee (Arts) | Age of Iron |
| K M Coleman (Arts) | Book IV of the Silvae of Statius | |
| 1989 | H Bradford (Arts) | A Taste of Freedom |
| 1988 | R G Lass (Arts) | The Shape of English: Structure and History |
| 1987 | M J Hall (Arts) | The Changing Past: Farmers, Kings and Traders in Southern Africa, 200 - 1860 |
| 1986 | L H Opie (Medicine) | The Heart: Physiology, Metabolism, Pharmacology and Therapy |
| 1985 | G M Branch (Science) | The Living Shores of South Africa |
| 1984 | J M Coetzee (Arts) | Waiting for the Barbarians |
