Kanyinsola Olorunnisola is K & L Prize 2020 winner.

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola was announced the winner of the K & L Prize 2020 on August 1, 2020.

The K & L Prize, founded by New Zealand-based Nigerian writer Myles Ojabo in 2018, awards $1000 (New Zealand) to the best piece of unpublished fiction. The inaugural edition, named after the kids of its founder Kyle and Leona, was awarded to South African Sisca Julius.

For the 2020 edition, the award made a call out for the best writing from the continent around the theme, Africanfuturism a term coined by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. Africanfuturism often depicts aliens, and sometimes witches, and is mostly set in a recognizable future Africa, with African lineages — which “are not cultural hybrids but rooted in the history and traditions of the continent” with no element or traits drawn from Western culture (or even pop culture).

The award was this year judged by Dione Joseph and the University of Winnipeg’s assistant professor Arthur Chigbo Anyaduba. They announced the longlist for the prize on May 8 before the shortlist was revealed on June 28.

The winner of the prize announced today is Kanyinsola Olorunnisola an experimental poet, essayist, and writer of fiction. His work has appeared in Popula, Gertrude, Bakwa, The Account, Bodega, Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. He is the founder of SprinNG, a literary platform for amplifying the voices of young writers, as well as Nation of Mad Men, a social justice project. He is the recipient of the 2016 Albert Jungers Poetry Prize and the 2017 Fisayo Soyombo National Essay Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Non-Fiction. He has published a chapbook: In My Country, We’re All Crossdressers” (Praxis, 2018).

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola on the revelation Tweeted, “I’m happy to announce that I won the 2020 K&L Prize for African Literature. @Ethereal_ilo finally!”