What is an efficient way of inserting thousands of records into an SQLite table using Django?

I have to insert 8000+ records into a SQLite database using Django's ORM. This operation needs to be run as a cronjob about once per minute.
At the moment I'm using a for loop to iterate through all the items and then insert them one by one.
Example:

for item in items:
    entry = Entry(a1=item.a1, a2=item.a2)
    entry.save()

What is an efficient way of doing this?

Edit: A little comparison between the two insertion methods.

Without commit_manually decorator (11245 records):

nox@noxdevel marinetraffic]$ time python manage.py insrec             

real    1m50.288s
user    0m6.710s
sys     0m23.445s

Using commit_manually decorator (11245 records):

[nox@noxdevel marinetraffic]$ time python manage.py insrec                

real    0m18.464s
user    0m5.433s
sys     0m10.163s

Note: The test script also does some other operations besides inserting into the database (downloads a ZIP file, extracts an XML file from the ZIP archive, parses the XML file) so the time needed for execution does not necessarily represent the time needed to insert the records.