Irenosen Okojie has been awarded the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing 2020 for her short story Grace Jones, today, July 27, 2020.
The AKO Caine Prize for African Writing is awarded annually for a short story by an African writer published in English. It is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. Previous winners have been Leila Aboulela (2000), Helon Habila (2001), Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Yvonne Owuor (2003), Brian Chikwava (2004), Segun Afolabi (2005), Mary Watson (2006), Monica Arac de Nyeko (2007), Henrietta Rose-Innes (2008), EC Osondu (2009), Olufemi Terry (2010), NoViolet Bulawayo (2011), Rotimi Babatunde (2012), Tope Folarin (2013), Okwiri Oduor (2014), Namwali Serpell (2015), Lidudumalingani Mqobothi (2016), Bushra al-Fadil (2017), Makena Onjerika (2018), and Lesley Nneka Arimah (2019).
The Chair of the AKO Caine Prize judging panel, director of The Africa Centre, Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp, announced the winner of the £10,000 prize in a film, directed and produced by British-Nigerian filmmaker Joseph A. Adesunloye, released on Monday, July 27. Alongside Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp on the 2020 judging panel were Audrey Brown, a South African broadcast journalist, and one of the leading voices for the BBC World Service, presenting the flagship daily news and current affairs programme, Focus on Africa. Gabriel Gbadamosi, an Irish-Nigerian poet and playwright. His London novel Vauxhall (2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. Ebissé Wakjira-Rouw, an Ethiopian-born non-fiction editor, podcaster, publisher and policy advisor at the Dutch Council for Culture in the Netherlands, and James Murua, a Kenya-based blogger, journalist, podcaster, and editor who has written for a variety of media outlets in a career spanning print, web, and TV.
Announcing the award, Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp CBE said: “This year’s winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing is a radical story that plays with logic, time and place; it defies convention, as it unfolds a narrative that is multi-layered and multi-dimensional. It is risky, dazzling, imaginative and bold; it is intense and full of stunning prose; it’s also a story that reflects African consciousness in the way it so seamlessly shifts dimensions, and it’s a story that demonstrates extraordinary imagination. Most of all, it is world-class fiction from an African writer.
“At the heart of this story is its main protagonist, a young woman from Martinique living in London, who is moonlighting as a celebrity impersonator; her journey moves exquisitely and seamlessly between the exploration of the universal experiences of unspeakable suffering, pleasure and escape, and the particular experience of being Black and African in a global city such as London.
“In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has prompted deeply powerful questions about race, justice, and equality in the world today – this story offers a salient exploration of what it can mean to embody and perform Blackness in the world. This is a story of tremendously delicate power and beauty, and one in which we recognise the tradition of African storytelling and imagination at its finest.”
Irenosen Okojie’s debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have appeared internationally in publications including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She was named at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri OBE as a dynamic writing talent to watch and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular, published by Jacaranda Books was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards, and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her collection of stories Nudibranch which includes her AKO Caine Prize-winning Grace Jones is published by Little Brown’s Dialogue Books.
Below is the announcement video.
Irenosen Okojie wins the prize money of £10,000. The other shortlisted writers all receive £500.
An anthology containing the five 2020 AKO Caine Prize shortlisted stories will be published in September 2020 by The New Internationalist.
‘Grace Jones’ is available to read now on the AKO Caine Prize website.
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