Literary heavy weights to judge 2018 Caine Prize

Nigerian novelist and director of the Ake Arts and Book Festival Lola Shoneyin, has been named in the 2018 judging panel of the Caine Prize for African writing. Ms Shoneyin is going to be part of a distinguished panel of judges to be chaired by Ethiopian–American writer Dinaw Mengestu, the Georgetown University nominee for the […]

Nigerian novelist and director of the Ake Arts and Book Festival Lola Shoneyin, has been named in the 2018 judging panel of the Caine Prize for African writing.

Ms Shoneyin is going to be part of a distinguished panel of judges to be chaired by Ethiopian–American writer Dinaw Mengestu, the Georgetown University nominee for the 2018 panel. 

Flamboyant Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou and South African novelist and previous winner of the prize, Henrietta Rose Innes as well as Zanzibar-born international journalist, political analyst and essayist Ahmed Rajab complete the panel. 

Collectively, the panel brings a variety of experience to the judging process and is no doubt one of the most exciting lineup of judges the Caine Prize has ever assembled.

Commenting on the 2018 judging panel, Chair of the Caine Prize, Dr Delia Jarrett-Macauley, said, “I am delighted that Dinaw Mengestu has agreed to be our 2018 Chair of the judges and we are looking forward to celebrating the panel’s findings.”

Entries for the 2018 Caine Prize, which awards £10, 000 punds for the winning single short story by an African writer, closes on January 31, 2018 with the judging panel meeting in April 2018 to determine which entries make the shortlist.

Winner of the prize will be announced on July 2, 2018 at the at Senate House, London, in collaboration with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This will be the second year since the prize ceremony was moved from its traditional venue in Oxford.

The last winner of the prize was Sudan’s Bushra al-Fadil for his work, “The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away” – translated from the original Arabic and published in The Book of Khartoum by Comma Press. 

The 2018 judging panel

Dinaw Mengestu is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s M.F.A programme in fiction. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a “5 under 35” honouree, and in 2012 he was selected as a MacArthur Fellow. Dinaw has written four novels: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007); Children of the Revolution (2007); How to Read the Air (2010); and All Our Names (2014). An active journalist, his work has appeared in various publications, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

Henrietta Rose-Innes is a South African author based in Cape Town. She has published four novels and a collection of short stories, and is currently completing a fifth novel, Stone Plant, due in 2018. Her work has been widely published and translated into several languages, with her novel Nineveh winning the 2015 François Sommer Literary Prize in French translation. In 2012, her story ‘Sanctuary’ took second place in the BBC International Short Story Competition. A shortlistee for the Caine Prize in 2007, Henrietta was awarded the 2008 Caine Prize for her story ‘Poison’, which also won the Southern African PEN Literary Award.

Lola Shoneyin is a Nigerian writer, whose published work includes poems and children’s books. Her debut novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, was published in 2010 and went on to win the 2011 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2011 Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize. Shoneyin is the Director of Ake Arts and Book Festival, an annual literary and cultural event that supports and celebrates artistic and cultural innovation in Africa, on African soil. She is also the creative director of the new Kaduna Book and Arts Festival which first took place in Kaduna State, Nigeria, earlier this year.

Alain Mabanckou was born in the Congo in 1966, and is a prolific Francophone Congolese poet and novelist. He is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels, and in 2012 won the Grand Prix de la Littérature. He is also the recipient of the Subsaharan African Literature Prize and the Prix Renaudot. His previous books include African Psycho, Broken Glass, Memoirs of a Porcupine and Black Bazaar. In 2015 he was listed as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. Alain currently lives in LA, where he teaches literature at UCLA.

Ahmed Rajab has worked for the BBC World Service, Index-on-Censorship, Africa Events, the seminal Africa Analysis (which he edited for 20 years) as well as UNESCO.  From 2006-2009 he was Head of Newsroom (Middle East/Asia Bureau in Dubai) for IRIN, the then UN humanitarian news agency. In addition to being a regular columnist for Tanzania’s premier weekly Raia Mwema, he now works as a consultant and is affiliated to the Kaduna-based Gusau Institute. Ahmed also writes poetry and his work is included in the anthology African New Voices (Longman, 1997).