Isele Prize 2025 winners announced

Josiah Ikpe, Fatima Abdullahi, and Tolu Daniel are the Isele Awards 2025 winners; the announcement was made on Friday, June 27, 2025.

The Isele Prizes were founded to celebrate the best short stories, poetry, and essays by writers published in Isele Magazine, founded in 2022, with a panel of two judges in each category. The winners in the first edition were Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, and Nora Nneka followed in 2023 by Ashia Ajani, Jennifer Dickinson, and Chinonso Nzeh. The 2024 winners were Gloria Mwaniga, Alex Leslie, and Erinola Daranijo.

The 2025 journey started with the announcement of ten in each of the three categories from the 250 entries for stories, essays, and poems published in Isele Magazine between February 1, 2024, and February 28, 2025. They were selected by an in-house jury who believed that their brilliance and emotional resonance captured the magazine’s mission to provide a platform for writers who hold a mirror to our society. The longlists were announced on Wednesday, April 16, before the shortlists were made public on May 16.

The winners revealed on Friday, June 27 are;

The Isele Short Story Prize

• Not Like Other Boys, Josiah Ikpe – Ikpe’s story tackles a serious subject matter with the directness and delicateness only language has the power to evoke. Ikpe’s sentences are tactfully varied in length. And as you read, you feel the weight and depth of the emotions he has aimed for, the seamless way he peels the story down to bare bones to reveal meanings that are emotionally and cultural resonant. This story asks what it means to endure cruelty and to prevail despite it. The humor here is timely and necessary; instead of despair typical of stories that explore such subject matter, we find laughter, we find brilliance, and we find an observant narrator whose world is rocked in the best way possible when our protagonist triumphs at the end.

The Isele Nonfiction Prize

• Notes of a Nonresident Alien, Tolu Daniel – Tolu Daniel’s is a haunting chronicle of life abroad. It is rendered in colors so vivid and in a language so wrenching that we feel the pulse of each sentence, the thrum of each numbered vignette. This essay asks what it means to survive in a place where cruelty to international persons and immigrants has become the street jingle. Our narrator constantly looks back to the home they left behind, remembering it, longing for it. It is clear that they would not have left had home not become what Warsan Shire calls “the mouth of a shark.” While this essay contributes to the broader conversation on immigration, it is also about love, about community, and longing. Ultimately, it is about stretching out one’s hand and reaching for an anchor, lest they get swept away by the cruelties of the time.

Isele Poetry Prize

• Three Poems, Fatima Abdullahi – Fatima Abdullahi’s poems contain profound emotion and lyrical precision, rendering personal grief as a collective experience. Each piece in the trio explores loss from different angles—ageing, the death of a father, and emotional detachment in mourning—with imagery that is tender, raw, and hauntingly memorable. The poems are remarkable not only for their technical control and intertextual references (from Dylan Thomas to Diana Der-Hovanessian), but also for their ability to collapse vast emotional landscapes into intimate, carefully wrought lines. Abdullahi’s voice is clear-eyed and compassionate, making space for silences, shadows, and the unspoken ways grief reshapes us. The work asks us to sit with our own losses and reconsider what it means to remember.

Read all of the winner entries here.