Historian Khumisho Moguerane and novelist Shubnum Khan are the winners of the  2025 Sunday Times Literary Awards! Moguerane won the non-fiction prize for Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s–1950s(Jacana Media), while Khan claimed the fiction award for The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil (Pan Macmillan). The awards were announced on December 4 at an in-person ceremony on the rooftop of Hill on Empire in Johannesburg.

Moguerane’s Morafe explores two generations of the prominent Molema family, “border people” who straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana. The judges declared: “this book is a historical landmark, a watershed in the shape and direction of African studies.” Moguerane is a historian of European empire in southern Africa and a researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her interdisciplinary approach explores how moral worlds shaped the everyday lives of frontier communities and affected political identity. With Morafe, she reveals that the concept of “nation” exists not just in public institutions and political struggles, but in the intimate drama of personal and ordinary lives—in marriage, landholding, education, and the daily practices that defined belonging.

Khan’s The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil unfolds in Akbar Manzil, a haunted and rundown seaside mansion in Durban that has stood for almost a century. The judges noted that “Khan captures the history and lived experiences of South Africa’s Indian community with unparalleled erudition, honesty and sensitivity.” The narrative meanders through different epochs, from the early 20th century to the present, following two women who will never meet: Meena, who fell in love with the mansion’s owner when it was the grandest residence on South Africa’s east coast, and Sana, who moves into the crumbling house with her father eight decades later. Khan is a South African author and artist whose first novel, Onion Tears, was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing and the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Writing in English. She holds a Master’s degree in English and has been selected for literary fellowships including the Octavia Butler Fellow at Jack Jones Literary Arts and as a Mellon Fellow at Stellenbosch University.

The awards, presented in partnership with Exclusive Books, mark the 35th anniversary of the non-fiction prize and 24 years of the fiction award. The non-fiction panel was chaired by journalist and media consultant Kevin Ritchie, joined by associate professor and researcher Hlonipha Mokoena, and author and owner of Book Circle Capital, Sewela Langeni. The fiction panel was chaired by author, playwright and academic Siphiwo Mahala, joined by award-winning literary journalist, writer and editor Michele Magwood, and medical doctor and co-founder of The Cheeky Natives podcast, Dr Alma-Nalisha Cele. Each winner receives R100,000.

Both Morafe and The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil represent profound engagements with South African history, one through rigorous historical scholarship that reshapes our understanding of colonial borders and belonging, the other through a gothic love story that illuminates the Indian South African experience across generations. Congratulations to both Khumisho Moguerane and Shubnum Khan on their well-deserved wins!