A former Pioneer School for the Blind learner has won the Ingrid Jonker prize for his collection of English poems.
The collection, An illuminated darkness, was published in 2020 by Jacques Coetzee.
This is his second body of published work, his first was a collaboration published in 2017.
Coetzee fell in love with writing when he was 12 years old, reading JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
“I just loved the worlds that were conjured by the words in the book – these far away places,” he said. “Then I started writing poems. They weren’t very good, but I cared about them.”
After matriculating from Pioneer School in 1991, Coetzee left Worcester to pursue his studies.
“I was an academic. But later fell out of that life and started hanging out with musicians and going out at night, and I started my master’s in creative writing. And that is when I started writing seriously.”
The title of his book, he explains, is taken from one of the poems in the book.
“As a child at high school I would sit at the top of the steps and read my book. I was a bit aloof from other children and just wanted to read.
“And gradually, as time went by, I came down from those steps and found other people. And in the poem I would light up the darkness with my words.”
He added there was a time when he just wanted to write himself away from blindness.
“Later in life I learnt I had interesting things to say about blindness and then I wrote myself deeper into blindness.”
He said he had always wanted to produce a book.
“By doing that one is making a statement. It is a place where poems can live together and feed into one another, almost like a musical album. I’m sure I would have been mad at myself at the end of my life if I hadn’t written a book.”
On hearing the news that he had won, he said: “’My mind was completely blank when I was informed that I had won. All I could think was: is this really happening? But I was honoured and surprised. I felt as if I was standing on the shoulders of giants. I was really happy because the most wonderful thing for a writer is to have their work recognised.”
