Mubanga Kalimamukwento’s manuscript Shipikisha won the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction 2024 on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
Dzanc Books was created in 2006 to advance great writing and impact communities nationally with its efforts to promote literary readership in the USA. One of their initiatives is the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction an annual award given to an original, daring, and innovative manuscript. The winner receives a $5,000 advance and publication by Dzanc Books. Previous winners have included Jessie van Eerden, Alan Grostephan, Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh, and Sarah Yahm.
The 2024 edition had a jury of Dzanc Books authors Farah Ali (The River, The Town), Chika Unigwe (The Middle Daughter), and Sarah Yahm (Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction. This jury read hundreds of manuscripts and declared Shipikisha by Mubanga Kalimamukwento the winner.
Set in Zambia, Shipikisha tells the story of Sali, a working mother of three on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. She allegedly shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. Through a braided narrative woven both before and during the trial, Sali navigates her husband’s infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, her postnatal depression, raising her teenage daughter Ntashé, and an attempted abortion in silence. Until the day her marriage finally fails to endure— shipikisha, considered the ultimate dereliction of wifely duty in Zambia. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face.
Ali said of the manuscript, “Shipikisha is electric. From the very first page, I was pulled into the worlds of Ntashé and her mother, Sali. This is a book where the passages, full of beautifully spare, sharp words, serve the story of relationships put to severe tests.”
Yahm added, “Kalimamukwento creates an unflinching account of the myriad forms of intimate violence and betrayal within a patriarchal system, interspersed with moments of startling tenderness. She rejects moral certitude, instead pulling us into the minds of messy, complex women attempting to survive and connect in an unjust world.”
Zambian attorney, editor, and writer Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana), unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press), Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer Books). She is the founding editor of Ubwali Literary Magazine, a current Miles Morland Scholar, and a PhD student and Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Kalimamukwento said of her win: “Shipikisha has long been a haunting, and its birthing was long and difficult, but now, standing on the other side, I am glad to say, it was worth it. Thank you to the judges for seeing and loving the women in this book as much as I do, and thank you to Dzanc Books for giving this book a home. I am honored.”
Publication is planned for March 2026.
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