UCT law professor Jaco Barnard-Naude awarded prestigious Ingrid Jonker Literary Prize

A senior University of Cape Town (UCT) law academic has claimed one of the most prestigious honours in Afrikaans literature, a rare crossover between legal scholarship and poetry.

Professor Jaco Barnard-Naude, director of research in UCT’s Faculty of Law, has been awarded the Ingrid Jonker Literary Prize for his debut poetry collection Om my kastele in Spanje te sloop (To demolish my castles in Spain).

The prize, widely regarded as the highest accolade for debut Afrikaans poetry, is awarded annually, alternating between English and Afrikaans collections published in the preceding two years. The 2025 award recognised Afrikaans debut poetry published in 2023 and 2024.

Published by Human & Rousseau in 2024, kastele gives voice to deeply personal experiences, including the sudden loss of Barnard-Naude’s best friend and his childhood growing up as a queer person in an abusive patriarchal Afrikaner family in apartheid-era South Africa.

Barnard-Naude said the collection began taking shape around 2007, following his friend’s death, and was completed early in 2023.

“The ‘inspiration’ overall came from the need to give voice to my personal traumas up to that point, of which there are many, mostly as a result of growing up as a queer person in the small town of Brits in the last decade of institutionalised apartheid in South Africa – and in an abusive patriarchal Afrikaner family,” he said.

The title of the collection is drawn from lines in a letter by Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, quoted in English translation in a biography by Ernest Jones.

Barnard-Naude’s engagement with literature stretches back decades. He began writing Afrikaans poetry in the mid-1990s and completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCT in 2011 under the supervision of Joan Hambidge. His first academic work on Afrikaans literature was published in 2012.

The Ingrid Jonker Prize holds particular personal meaning for him.

“Ingrid Jonker is the first Afrikaans poet with whom I fell in love in the mid-nineties, before I started writing poetry. So, it feels a bit like things have come full circle,” he said.

“For a debut poet who has always been very unsure about whether I am ‘good enough’, the award of this prize endows a lot of creative courage, perseverance, tenacity as well as pure and simple joy.”

Barnard-Naude joined UCT’s Faculty of Law as a lecturer in 2004 and was promoted to professor in 2011. He currently teaches jurisprudence and spatial justice, supervises postgraduate students at master’s and doctoral level, and serves a second term as the faculty’s director of research.

His research interests include justice in modernist visual poetry and post-apartheid psychoanalytic critical jurisprudence. He holds a B1 rating from the National Research Foundation and has received the UCT Fellows Award.

Internationally, he has held fellowships with the British Academy, the University of Westminster, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. From January 1, 2026, he will hold the WP Schreiner Chair in Private Law and Jurisprudence at UCT.

Barnard-Naude is currently working, “very slowly and very hesitantly”, on a second poetry collection. He is also collaborating with acclaimed South African poet and translator Karen Press on the English translation of kastele.

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