Redemption Song, the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing anthology, published in Zimbabwe

amaBooks have published the 2018 Caine Prize anthology, Redemption Song and Other Stories. This is the seventh of the Caine collections brought out by amaBooks in Zimbabwe. The collection is also published in other countries across Africa and the rest of the world

Now in its nineteenth year the Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa’s leading literary prize, and is awarded to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere.

Redemption Song brings together the five 2018 shortlisted stories, along with stories written at the Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop, which took place in Rwanda in April 2018. The collection includes two Zimbabwean writers Bongani Kona and Bongani Sibanda. Bongani Kona is also featured in the 2017 amaBooks short story collection Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories and in the 2016 Caine Prize anthology The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things.

The winner of the 2018 prize was Kenyan writer Makena Onjerika for 'Fanta Blackcurrant', published in Wasafiri. The Chair of the Caine Prize judging panel, award winning Ethiopian-American novelist and writer, Dinaw Mengestu, announced Makena as the winner of the £10,000 prize at an award dinner on Monday 2 July. The ceremony was held for the second time in Senate House, in partnership with SOAS and the Centre for African Studies.

Narrated in the first person plural, 'Fanta Blackcurrant' follows Meri, a street child of Nairobi, who makes a living using her natural intelligence and charisma, but wants nothing more than ‘a big Fanta Blackcurrant for her to drink every day and it never finish'. While it seems Meri's natural wit may enable her to escape the streets, days follow days and years follow years, and having turned to the sex trade, she finds herself pregnant. Her success stealing from Nairobi’s business women attracts the attention of local criminals, who beat her and leave her for dead. After a long recovery, Meri ‘crossed the river and then we do not know where she went’.

Dinaw Mengestu praised the story in his remarks, saying, 'the winner of this year’s Caine Prize is as fierce as they come – a narrative forged but not defined by the streets of Nairobi, a story that stands as more than just witness. Makena Onjerika’s 'Fanta Blackcurrant 'presides over a grammar and architecture of its own making, one that eschews any trace of sentimentality in favour of a narrative that is haunting in its humour, sorrow and intimacy'.

Makena is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing programme at New York University, and has been published in Urban Confustions and Wasifiri. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya, and is currently working on a fantasy novel.

The other shortlisted stories comprised:

American Dream by Nonyelum Ekwempu (Nigeria)

The Armed Letter Writers by Olofunke Ogundimu (Nigeria)

Involution by Stacy Hardy (South Africa)

Wednesday’s Story by Wole Talabi (Nigeria)

The workshop stories are:

No Ordinary Soirée by Paula Akugizibwe

Tie Kidi by Awuor Onyango

Calling the Clouds Home by Heran T. Abate

America by Caroline Numuhire

All Things Bright and Beautiful by Troy Onyango

Departure by Nsah Mala

Where Rivers Go to Die by Dilman Dila

Ngozi by Bongani Sibanda

The Weaving of Death by Lucky Grace Isingizwe

Redemption Song by Arinze Ifeakandu

Spaceman by Bongani Kona

Grief is the Gift that Breaks the Spirit Open by Eloghosa Osunde

The 2018 judging panel comprises: Dinaw Mengestu, journalist, author and graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s M.F.A programme in fiction; Alain Mabanckou, prolific Francophone Congolese poet and novelist and Man Booker International Prize finalist (2015); reporter, columnist and poet Ahmed Rajab; Henrietta Rose-Innes, a South African author who won the Caine Prize in 2008; Lola Shoneyin, a Nigerian writer who has won the Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize, among others.

The prize was launched in 2000 to encourage and highlight the richness and diversity of African writing by bringing it to a wider audience internationally. The focus on the short story reflects the contemporary development of the African story-telling tradition.

Why I Read by Bongani Kona

Bongani Kona, photo courtesy of the Caine Prize

In December 1999, as their final act before the turn of the millennium, TIME magazine published a special issue profiling the hundred most influential people of the 20^th Century. I remember casually paging through the issue and being drawn by the brief entry on Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who invented television. What really caught my interest was not the entry itself – Farnsworth died in relative obscurity, dogged by lawsuits and in debt – but the caption that ran underneath the photograph, of a man sitting with his back turned to the camera, in a room surrounded by screens. It said Farnsworth was unhappy with what he saw, even before 500 channels.

Perhaps because I was going through puberty and its attendant flux of emotion – I was fourteen that year – I felt a sense of kinship with Farnsworth. I could relate to that difficult-to-explain unhappiness, even as a teenager growing up in Harare. In hindsight, the reason I’ve never forgotten that episode is because I understood for the first time something I’d always felt but had been unable to name; what it means to be alone.  

I’m trying to explain to you, in so few words, why I was drawn so much to the world of books. Reading made me feel less estranged from the world. My favourite scene in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is when Holden Caulfield goes to visit Mr. Antolini and he says to him: “Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

In short, reading has been my way of connecting with the world. My way of understanding what it means to be human. I can’t offer an equally coherent explanation for why I write. Writing is difficult and it’s the only line of work I know of where you’re guaranteed to fail more times than you succeed and there have been times when I’ve given up. The only reason I keep going is because I want to give to someone else what books have given to me. A way out of loneliness.

Zimbabwean writer Bongani Kona was shortlisted for the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing with his short story 'At your Requiem'. The story is published in the 2016 Caine Prize anthology The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things, published by amaBooks in Zimbabwe, New Internationalist in the UK, Jacana Media in South Africa, Interlink Books in Nigeria, Kwani? in Kenya, Sub-Saharan Publishers in Ghana, Gadsden Books in Zambia, Femrite in Uganda and Langaa in Cameroon. 'At your Requiem' was first published in South Africa by Burnet Media in Incredible Journey: Stories That Move You.

Bongani is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Chimurenga. His writing has appeared in Mail & Guardian, Rolling Stone (South Africa), Sunday Times and other publications and websites. He is also enrolled as a Masters student in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Cape Town. 

The Caine Prize Anthology 2013 - A Memory This Size - published in Zimbabwe

'amaBooks has co-published the 2013 Caine Prize anthology. A Memory This Size, with six other African publishers - Jacana Media in South Africa, Cassava Republic in Nigeria, Kwani? in Kenya, FEMRITE in Uganda, Sub-Saharan Publishers in Ghana and Bookworld in Zambia - and with New Internationalist in the United Kingdom. The winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing was Tope Folarin of Nigeria with the story Miracle.

A chronically shortsighted young man finds himself the target of a preacher’s miracle cure… Despite his American street phrases and his fistful of dollars, a prodigal son’s visit to his Sierra Leone home does not go quite as planned… A medical student blinded in an accident seems to lose everything but soon learns what he has gained… Life on the edge for a gang of street boys paid to disrupt an election… An oil spill opens a path for a Nigerian teacher to join the woman she loves in the US…

The shortlisted stories for the 2013 Caine Prize – Africa’s leading literary prize – offer five arresting, diverse, provocative snapshots of a continent and its descendants captured at a time of accelerating change.

The shortlisted authors are:

Tope Folarin (Nigeria) for Miracle

Pede Hollist (Sierra Leone) for Foreign Aid

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) for The Whispering Trees

Elnathan John (Nigeria) for Bayan Layi 

Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria) America

In addition, 12 writers from six different African countries took part in the Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop, held this year in Uganda, where they each produced a special story for this volume. 

These 17 stories show yet again the richness and range of current writing on the continent. They underline the primacy of the short story, with its oral antecedents, at the very heart of African literature.

Africa’s most important literary award.’  – International Herald Tribune

‘Dazzling and splendidly diverse.’  – The Times, London

Caine Prize Judges announced

The judges of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing have been announced. The panel will be chaired by art historian and broadcaster Dr Gus Casely-Hayford. He will be joined by award-winning Nigerian-born artist, Sokari Douglas Camp; author, columnist and Lord Northcliffe Emeritus Professor at UCL, John Sutherland; Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Professor Nathan Hensley and the winner of the Caine Prize in its inaugural year, Leila Aboulela. 

This year 96 qualifying stories have been submitted to the judges from 16 African countries. The judges will meet in early May to decide on the shortlisted stories, which will be announced shortly thereafter. The winning story will be announced at a dinner at the Bodleian Library in Oxford on Monday 8 July.

The five shortlisted stories, alongside the stories written at the Caine Prize workshops are published annually by New Internationalist (UK), Jacana Media (South Africa), Cassava Republic (Nigeria), Kwani? (Kenya), Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana), FEMRITE (Uganda), Bookworld Publishers (Zambia) and ‘amaBooks (Zimbabwe).

Included in the 2012 anthology is the story by last year’s Nigerian winner, Rotimi Babatunde. Chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo said at the time, “Bombay's Republic vividly describes the story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma campaign of World War Two. It is ambitious, darkly humorous and in soaring, scorching prose exposes the exploitative nature of the colonial project and the psychology of Independence.”

The 2012 anthology, African Violet, is available in Zimbabwe in Harare at the National Gallery, the Book Cafe, Blackstones and Avondale Bookshop and in Bulawayo at the National Gallery, Induna Arts, Tendele Crafts, Best Books, Innov8 Ascot and Z&N Bookshop.

from:www.thezimbabwean.co.uk

2012 Caine Prize anthology published in Zimbabwe

'amaBooks are delighted to have published African Violet, the 2012 Caine Prize anthology, joining other African publishers Cassava Republic in Nigeria, Jacana Media in South Africa, FEMRITE in Uganda, Sub-Saharan Publishers in Ghana, Bookworld Publishers in Zambia and Kwani? in Kenya in their commitment to making good stories from Africa available to be read across the African continent. The book is also published by New Internationalist in the United Kingdom.

       The Caine Prize for African Writing collection showcases short stories in English by writers from across the African continent. For the first time, the 2012 anthology is published in Zimbabwe.

Selected from 122 stories from 14 African countries, this anthology contains the stories from the 13th annual Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist, along with those from the 10th Caine Prize workshop for African writers, which was held in South Africa earlier in the year.

The Caine Prize is recognized as Africa’s leading literary competition, often referred to as ‘Africa’s Booker’. The book contains contributions from two Zimbabwean writers, Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, whose story La Salle de Départ was shortlisted for the 2012 prize, and Tendai Rinos Mwanakana.

The winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize for this year is Rotimi Babatunde for his short story entitled Bombay’s Republic, which deals with the story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma campaign of World War Two. The other authors shortlisted for the Caine Prize appearing in the publication are Billy Kahora (Kenya); Stanley Kenani (Malawi); and Constance Myburgh (South Africa).

The other stories in the collection are by Mehul Gohil (Kenya), Grace Khunou (South Africa), Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana), BM Kunga (Kenya), Waigwa Ndiang’ui (Kenya), Yewande Omotoso (Nigeria / South Africa), Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda), Rehana Rossouw (South Africa) and Rachel Zadok (South Africa).

‘Dazzling and splendidly diverse’ – The Times, London

‘A vital collection drawing on a rich treasury of material’ – The Guardian, London

‘Africa’s most important literary award’ – International Herald Tribune

'Over the past ten years, the Caine Prize has done a great deal to foster writing in Africa and bring exciting new African writers to the attention of wider audiences' - J. M. Coetzee

Long Time Coming a 'Best Book of 2009'

Long Time Coming: Short Writings from Zimbabwe has been chosen by New Internationalist as one of their two 'Best Books of 2009'. They commented that: 'Each piece here – and they are miniature marvels, with no story longer than eight pages – vividly illuminates an aspect of what it is actually like to live in a country that has been systematically looted and stripped of functioning organizations. From a Zimbabwean publishing house, this book’s very existence seems little short of a miracle. '

The second 'Best Book' chosen was also African, José Eduardo Agualusa's novel Rainy Season, set in Angola.

The list of best books, films, music can be found at http://www.newint.org/columns/media/2010/01/01/best-of-2009/

New Internationalist magazine has existed for over 30 years and currently is the largest progressive magazine in circulation in the United Kingdom. It also has editorial and sales offices in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA  It has recently won the UTNE Independent Media Award for "Best International Coverage" for the eighth time.