The Caine Prize for African Writing has released the shortlist of five for this year’s edition to include two Nigerians, a Cameroonian, Ethiopian and Kenyan.
The Nigerians, Lesley Nneka Arimah and Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor, got on the list respectively for ‘Skinned’ and ‘All Our Lives’.
Arimah who lives and works in the United States of America, was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 53, while her Nigerian counterpart, Okafor was published in ID Identity: New Short Fiction From Africa.
Born in the UK, Arimah grew up in Nigeria and around the world wherever work took her father. She has won a National Magazine Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and an O. Henry Award and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation and MacDowell.
Selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, her debut collection What it Means when a Man Falls from the Sky won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in Las Vegas and is working on a novel about you.
Okafor’s work, on the other hand, has appeared in the 2018 Best of the Net, the 2019 Best Small Fictions, The Guardian, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. A 2018 Rhodes Scholar finalist and a 2018 Kathy Fish Fellow, he has won the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize for Short Fiction. He has been shortlisted for the 2017 Awele Creative Trust Award, the 2016 Problem House Press Short Story Prize, and the 2016 Southern Pacific Review Short Story Prize. He lives in Pittsburgh, USA, and is at work on a novel and a short story collection.
Meron Hadero (Ethiopia), Cherrie Kandie (Kenya) and Ngwah-Mbo Nana Nkweti (Cameroon) complete the list. Hedero got shortlisted for ‘The Wall’ published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 52; ID Identity: New Short Fiction From Africa published Kandie’s ‘Sew My Mouth’, while Nkweti’s ‘It Takes A Village Some Say’ is published in The Baffler.
Interestingly, all the writers have a connection with America one way or another. The links to their stories can be found on the Caine Prize website.
In a statement announcing the shortlist on Monday, May 20, the prize said it features stories that tackle “the ordinary in an extraordinary manner” and celebrate the diversity of the African short-story writing tradition for the twentieth edition of the Prize.
Chair of judges, Kenyan author Dr Peter Kimani said: “This is a special year for the Caine Prize for African Writing, as it marks its twentieth anniversary. It’s a milestone that affords for both a reflection on the past, and a projection into the future.
“Without exception, past Caine Prize winners have been revolutionary and evolutionary— breaking fresh ground, while pushing the African story from the margins to the mainstream of world literature.
“The five writers on this year’s shortlist carry on with that tradition, not just in their inventiveness in imagining the world, but also in tackling the ordinary in an extraordinary manner, in a wide-range of issues: gender and generation; home and exile; sexuality and religion; love and hate; happiness and heartbreak.”
Other members of the 2019 judging panel are Sefi Atta, Nigerian author and playwright shortlisted for the 2006 Caine Prize; Margie Orford, acclaimed author hailed as the “queen of South African crime-thriller writers”; Scott Taylor, professor and director of the African Studies Program at Georgetown University; and Olufemi Terry, Sierra Leone-born author and winner of the 2010 Caine Prize.
The winner of this year’s £10,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony and dinner in the Beveridge Hall at Senate House, SOAS, on Monday 8 July 2018 – in partnership with SOAS, University of London. Each shortlisted writer will also receive £500.
The shortlisted stories will be printed by New Internationalist in a special publication to mark the twentieth Caine Prize award dinner, and through co-publishers in 16 African countries who receive a print-ready PDF free of charge.
This year, the Caine Prize is publishing a special anniversary anthology to mark its twentieth year and award.