AiW Guest: Iquo DianaAbasi This week, we will feature reviews of the five stories shortlisted for the 2017 Caine Prize for African Writing. The prize winner will be announced on Monday 3 July. Today’s review is of Nigerian author Chikodili Emelumadu’s story… Read More ›
Caine Prize for African Writing
Caine Prize Shortlist Reviews, Part 2: ‘Who Will Greet You At Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah
AiW Guest: Kufre Usanga This week, we will feature reviews of the five stories shortlisted for the 2017 Caine Prize for African Writing. The prize winner will be announced on Monday 3 July. Today’s review is of Nigerian author Lesley Nneka… Read More ›
Caine Prize Shortlist Reviews, Part 1: ‘The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away’ by Bushra al-Fadil
AiW Guest: Rebekah Bale This week, we will feature reviews of the five stories shortlisted for the 2017 Caine Prize for African Writing. The prize winner will be announced on Monday 3 July. Our first review is of Sudanese author… Read More ›
Caine Prize 2016: “Memories We Lost”—The Text, Its Readers and the World, a review by Pede Hollist
AiW Guest Pede Hollist The biography at the end of “Memories We Lost” quotes South African writer, filmmaker, and photographer Lidudumalingani as saying, “I am fascinated by mental illnesses, having seen my own extended relatives deal with it.” He also… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Elnathan John’s ‘Flying’
AiW Guest Madhu Krishnan Elnathan John’s ‘Flying’ opens with a dream and ends with a limping chicken. If that sentence sounds incongruous, it, like the story itself, is deliberately so. Throughout its course, ‘Flying’ – at only just over 4200… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Segun Afolabi’s ‘The Folded Leaf’
AiW Guest: John Uwa In reviewing Segun Afolabi’s ‘The Folded Leaf’, a short story shortlisted for Caine Prize 2015, one must resist the temptation to mounting up praises on the text. It is certainly a well-articulated and thematically focused text; and… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Namwali Serpell’s ‘The Sack’
I am leaning toward a prediction that Namwali Serpell will be the winner of this year’s Caine Prize for a number of reasons. For starters, a win for Serpell would go some way to deflecting one of the major criticisms… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Okwiri Oduor’s ‘My Father’s Head’
AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru As I began to read ‘My Father’s Head’, I thought for a moment that it was going to be yet another Caine Prize story set in church and about cunning priests and their gullible as well as… Read More ›
Blogging the Caine Prize: Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’
A story about waste – human waste – in immaculate prose, Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’ has, for me, a quality of suspension. On the one hand, it’s about the defiant resistance of ‘an old lady’ against loss, of her habitual daily… Read More ›