A minor controversy has broken out in South Africa over the award of the Boeke Prize to Frank McCourt for his worldwide bestseller Angela's Ashes. The problem is that the prize, run by Exclusive Books, the country's main bookselling chain, is for fiction.
McCourt's work is a non-fiction memoir. Literary types now wonder if the confusion arose because South Africans don't know the difference, or if they refuse to believe that life in Limerick could ever have been this bad.
