Caine Prize for Writing: Meet 3 Igbos shortlisted for £10,000 prize money

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The Caine Prize for African Writing is an annual literary award aimed at bringing African writing to a wider audience. The Caine prize has helped a lot of emerging writers enter the world of mainstream publishing through the annual Caine Prize writers’ workshop.

Caine Prize for Writing: Meet 3 Igbos shortlisted for £10,000 prize money

This year, three Igbos, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Chikodili Emelumadu and Arinze Ifeakandu, are among the five writers shortlisted for the 2017 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Bushra al-Fadil, from Sudan, and Magogodi Makhene, from South Africa, were also shortlisted.

Lesley Nneka Arimah submitted Who Will Greet You At Home, a story published in The New Yorker (USA. 2015), in which she imagined a universe of handcrafted babies. Lesley has been published in The New Yorker and Granta; her story, Light, was the winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, and another of her stories What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky was shortlisted for last year’s Caine prize.

Chikodili Emelumadu sent in Bush Baby, a story that was published in African Monsters, an anthology of African stories. Bush Baby tells the captivating story of a heroine whose family pulled her into their bad decisions like gravity. Chikodili is a writer, broadcaster and blogger living in London; and her work has been published in many magazines. She was a 2015 Shirley Jackson nominee.

Arinze Ifeakandu submitted God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, a story published in A Public Space 24, a literary magazine. Arinze is a alumnus of the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, he was shortlisted for the BN Poetry Award in 2015 and he was a 2015 A Public Space (APS) Emerging Writer fellow.

The winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony and dinner at Senate House Library, London, on Monday 3 July.

Each shortlisted writer will also receive £500. The five writers’ stories will also be published in New Internationalist’s 2017 Caine Prize anthology The Goddess of Mwtara and Other Stories in June.

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