Mustafa Enesi’s short story Safety Pins Are Good Omens was declared the winner of the Awele Creative Trust Award 2021 on April 7, 2022.
The Awele Creative Trust is a non-profit organisation created to provide an enabling environment and platform for creative young persons founded by Chika Unigwe. Its annual prize the Awele Creative Trust Award, valued at ₦50,000, rewards a short story of up to 5,000 words by a Nigerian writer aged between 16 and 26. Previous winners include Caleb Adebayo (2014), Nneoma Ike Njoku (2015), Caleb Somtochukwu Okereke and Anthony Ezekwoh (2016), Imade Iyamu (2017), and Bakporhe Ufuomaoghene (2019), and Joshua Chizoma (2020).
The longlist for the award was announced on February 7 before the shortlist was revealed on March 5. The winner was revealed to be Mustapha Enesi for the short story Safety Pins Are Good Omens where the narrator gropes her way through grief to agency. Its ending is where the narrator’s new life begins. According to the judges, there is an urgency to the story and a tenderness to the telling that is gripping.
Mustapha Enesi, who writes from Lagos, is a bright young star in the Nigerian literary scene whose works have appeared in several online literary magazines. His short stories and flash fiction pieces explore marginalized individuals within Africa. His story, Kesandu won the 2021 K & L Prize for African Literature, he was a finalist for the 2021 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, 2021 Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize, and his flash fiction piece, ‘Shoes’ was highly commended in Litro Magazine’s 2021 summer flash fiction contest
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