Portia Dery is Africana Book Award 2018 winner for Grandma’s List.

Ghanaian writer, Portia Dery is the Africana Book Award 2018 winner for Grandma’s List. The book was illustrated by South African artist Toby Newsome.    

The Children’s Africana Book Award is an annual prize presented to authors and illustrators of the best children’s and young adult books on Africa published or republished in the U.S.A. The awards were created by Africa Access and the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association and its sponsors include the African Studies departments of universities Harvard, Howard and Yale among others. Previous winning writers of CABA include Desmond Tutu, Niki Daly and Nnedi Okorafor.

The children’s book Grandma’s List is a colorful story about an 8-year old girl Fatima, who wants to save the day by helping her Grandmother complete her list of errands. The problem is, Fatima loses the list and she has to recall from memory what was written on it. The rest of story then takes the reader on a funny and heartwarming adventure with Fatima and her family.

Grandma’s List published by African Bureau Stories, won the 2018 CABA Young Children’s category along with books from international publishers Penguin Random House, Candlewick Press and Lantana Publishing and a few others. This is the second international children’s book award for Grandma’s List having previously won the Golden Baobab Prize for The Best Picture Book manuscript in Africa in 2014.

Anastasia Shown, a CABA Reviewer from the University of Pennsylvania says: “Grandma’s List is an excellent read aloud book for school or storytime. The illustrations show a neighborhood in Ghana that is very typical of many African towns with shops, gardens, small livestock, and many people outside working and playing…One of the best features of the book is the characters of many ages. There are kids playing, vendors selling, teens on their phones, grownups working, and elders relaxing. They wear African prints and western styled clothes…The book can generate lots of great open ended questions.”

Here are images from the award winning book courtesy of the publishers;