The South African connection # 368

The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

Due to "a weird administrative blip", no prize was awarded in 1970, so they are making up for it now. On the short list:

[W]e have Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, a fictionalised biography of Alexander the Great of a kind that couldn't be more fashionable now.

Although Renault was born in England, she lived in my old hometown, Durban in South Africa, most of her life:

In 1933, she began training as a nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. During her training, she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a life-long romantic relationship.

She worked as a nurse while beginning a writing career, treating Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol, and working in Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward until 1945. She published her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939; it had a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, which novelist Linda Proud described as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance". Her 1943 novel The Friendly Young Ladies, about a lesbian relationship between a writer and a nurse, seems inspired by her own relationship with Mullard.

In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa, where they remained for the rest of their lives. There, according to Proud, they found a community of gay expatriates who had "escaped the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain for the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Durban.... Mary and Julie found themselves able to set up home together in this new land without causing the outrage they had sometimes provoked at home."
...
It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time — in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen who fall in love during World War II, and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956), the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes; her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership. It would also foster rumors that Renault was really a gay man writing under a female pseudonym. Renault found these rumors amusing, but also sought to distance herself from being labeled a "gay writer."
...
Though Renault appreciated her gay following (and the income it provided), she was uncomfortable with the "gay pride" movement that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots. Like Laurie Odell, the protagonist of her 1953 novel The Charioteer, she was suspicious of identifying oneself by one's sexual orientation. Late in her life, she expressed hostility toward the gay rights movement, troubling some of her devoted fans.

The irony is that she went to South Africa to "escape the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain" but her Greek historical novels were banned in South Africa in her lifetime. She died in 1983.