Bessie Head literature awards for 2012 deferred

BHHT announced that the writing competition will not be held in 2012, and no awards will be made. "The trust has several reasons for this decision. First the competition has become large. Last year's competition drew 125 entrants.  The Trust had not anticipated such a response and had difficulties in administering such a number of manuscripts. We realised that in the future we would need a different organisation to administer the Awards, perhaps a regular secretariat instead of an ad-hoc group of Trustees," the trust explained in a statement.The statement further said that because setting up such an infrastructure requires time and reflection, the Trust decided to delay the next competition by at least a year.

It also explained that its dedicated financial sponsor, Pentagon Publishers, who have donated P28,500 of prize money to date, had decided that they could no longer continue as the sole source of funding for the Awards.