Panashe Chigumadzi, Nneoma Ike-Njoku and Troy Onyango are three of the six writers that Transition Magazine have nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize published by Pushcart Press that honors the best “poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot” published in the small presses over the previous year. The anthologies have been published annually since 1976 with this year being the fourtieth anniversary of the project. The founding editors are Anaïs Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, Daniel Halpern, Gordon Lish, Harry Smith, Hugh Fox, Ishmael Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, Rhoda Schwartz, Richard Morris, Ted Wilentz, Tom Montag, Bill Henderson and William Phillips.
Among the writers who received early recognition in Pushcart Prize anthologies were Kathy Acker, Steven Barthelme, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Bruce Boston, Raymond Carver, Joshua Clover, Junot Diaz, Andre Dubus, and Wells Tower.
The prize welcomes up to six nominations (print or online) from little magazine and small book press editors throughout the world. Transition Magazine yesterday revealed the names of the six people who they nominated for this round of the prize. They are Panashe Chigumadzi, Troy Onyango, Nneoma Ike-Njoku, Regina N Bradley, Bernard Matambo, and Bryan Washington.
The Transition Magazine for those not in the know was founded and published by Ugandan Rajat Neogy and ran from 1961 to 1976. The journal was revived in 1991 and is now based at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The writers who were nominated have been having a good year where their work is concerned. Troy Onyango won the inaugural Nyanza Literary Prize 2016. Panashe won the K Sello Duiker Prize at the South Africa Literary Awards earlier this week. Nneoma Ike-Njoku won the Awele Creative Trust Award earlier in the year.
With these writers, some of the best coming out of the continent, we hope that they make this respected anthology.
Leave a Reply