Prof Maluleke’s book longlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards

TUT Vice-Chancellor and Principal Prof Tinyiko Maluleke’s book, Faces and Phases of Resilience: A Memoir of a Special Kind, has been longlisted in the non-fiction category of the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2026. The announcement was made by the Sunday Times on 23 May 2026.

In captivating prose, Maluleke’s book chronicles his eventful childhood and boyhood in Soweto and the Limpopo villages of Valdezia, Basani and Nkowankowa. The book also covers his tertiary education years in Pietermaritzburg, as well as his time as a student in North America and as a visiting scholar in Europe and on the African continent.

Taking his cue from one of the doyens of African literature, Maluleke suggests that rather than confining ourselves to “the narrowest of navel-gazing biographies … it may be prudent to return to Es’kia Mphahlele and learn how to locate our tiny little stories within the jungle of humanity, and within the long durée of the tyranny of place and the tyranny of time”.  

Accordingly, in Faces and Phases of Resilience, Maluleke’s own personal story is bathed in a sea of critical reflections about his peers, compatriots and unsung heroes – from his amazing grandmother to the equally magnificent grandmothers of the likes of Tshilidzi Marwala, Siya Kolisi, Vusi Mahlasela, and Mosa Moshabela, and other phenomenal women and great men. The result is a book that can be characterised as a national memoir, brimming with fascinating human stories, inclusive of Maluleke’s own – stories that traverse the length and breadth of the country, from the Levubu River in Limpopo to the River Gqarrha in Eastern Cape.

Recalling the most enduring memory of his own mother, a memory rooted in the day of her funeral, which he attended as a three-year-old, Maluleke’s memoir does not shy away from tackling the South African story of bigotry, structural violence and premature death.

Faces and Phases of Resilience is one of 22 longlisted books in the non-fiction category of the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2026. Other great non-fiction books in the longlist include, among others, Antje Krog’s Blood’s Inner Rhyme: An Autobiographical Novel, Yunus Carrim’s Attacking the Heart of Apartheid: The ANC’s MK Special Operations Unit, and Tanya Zack’s The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City.

The shortlist will be announced in the next few months, with the awards announcement ceremony slated for the latter part of the year.