Sarah Ladipo Manyika is on the Goldsmiths Prize 2016 shortlist for her novel Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun. The book is published by Cassava Republic Press which has offices in both Nigeria and the UK.
The Goldsmiths Prize, a British literary award worth £10,000, was founded in 2013 for fiction that “opens up new possibilities for the novel form”. It is sponsored by Goldsmiths, University of London in association with the New Statesman. The award is limited to UK and Irish authors and books must be published by a UK-based publisher. Previous winners of the prize include Eimear McBride for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013), Ali Smith, How to Be Both (2014) and Kevin Barry for Beatlebone (2015).
Sarah Ladipo Manyika came to our attention when she was selected to be on the judging panel for the first edition of the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Then we found out that she was the person behind the highly regarded novel In Dependence. The team she was in selected Noviolet Bulawayo as the first winner of what is now the most sought out prize for a debut author. She would continue on in the next year as the chair of the panel choosing Africa’s best debut novel.
Earlier this year we were filled with glee as we announced that Manyika’s sophomore novel Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun about a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman, lives in San Francisco was with us. The book had endorsements from people Aminatta Forna, NoViolet Bulawayo, Jamal Mahjoub, E.C. Osondu, and Brian Chikwava. Not bad by any dint of the imagination.
It looks like these folks were onto something as it was nominated by the Goldman Prize. The winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at a ceremony at Foyles in central London on 9th November.
“Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by a novelist called Sarah Ladipo Manyika – she’s a Nigerian British writer. It’s her second novel and it’s about a seventy-four-year-old Nigerian woman living in San Francisco. It looks at issues to do with aging loneliness and dependency,” Bernardine Evaristo one of the judges of the prize said of the book when they were introducing the book below.
The Goldsmiths Prize 2016 judges on the shortlist from Goldsmiths, University of London on Vimeo.
Below is the full list of those shortlisted;
Transit, Rachel Cusk, Cape
Hot Milk, Deborah Levy, Hamish Hamilton
The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride, Faber & Faber
Solar Bones, Mike McCormack, Tramp Press
Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Cassava Republic Press
Martin John And Other Stories, Anakana Schofield
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