The English Academy of Southern Africa has announced that Mary Corrigall, senior feature writer and art critic at The Sunday Independent, has won the Thomas Pringle Award for Reviews.

This achievement by Corrigall is unusual for someone in the field of art criticism, one which does not commonly receive much recognition in the general framework of journalism. Corrigall was awarded for the high quality of her reviews.

Commenting on her win the adjudicators noted that: 'In her writing she is never dismissive, but strives to understand the "why" of an event, art form or cultural display, often penetrating to a layer of intelligibility that would escape a more superficial or judgmental tack. She is reliably perceptive, sensitively responsive, an "embedded" journalist of a particular kind, willing to immerse herself in the experience at hand.'

Corrigall will be presented with her award on March 21 on the occasion of the English Academy's Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture.