Unathi Slasha’s manuscript The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies was announced the Iskanchi Book Prize 2025 winner on Monday, June 30, 2025.
Iskanchi Press, which has produced several literary magazine editions and numerous books, was founded in 2020. In 2024, they announced the Iskanchi Book Prize to bring to light the best new writing from the continent. Open to African writers wherever they lived, it sought to honour outstanding prose and hybrid book manuscripts, offering someone a publishing opportunity. The first winner was Aminta Dupuis.
The 2025 edition of the competition kicked off with the announcement of the shortlist on Tuesday, May 27, before the winner, Unathi Slasha’s The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies, was announced on Monday, June 30.
Unathi Slasha is a writer from Despatch, Port Elizabeth, whose work has been published in several South African literary journals, including Ntinga, AERODOME, New Coin, and Badilisha Poetry X-Change. He is the author of the novella Jah Hills and the chapbook Much with the Dead & Mum with the Dying, or: Rigidities of Rationalism, Camaraderie Criticism & Contemporary South African Literature. His work is an attempt to reimagine and subvert Nguni folklore, writing what he coined as “The Unlanguaged World.”
The winning manuscript will be published by Iskanchi Press.
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