Three Nigerians shortlisted for Macmillan Award
NEXT columnist,
Pius Adesanmi, is among three Nigerians shortlisted for the inaugural
Penguin Prize for African Writing. He is listed with Chika Ezeanya and
Tanure Ojaide, along with 13 other African writers.
The prize comes
with a cash award of R50000 (about N1million), a publishing contract
with Penguin Books South Africa, and worldwide distribution via Penguin
Group companies.
The competition,
organised by Penguin Books South Africa, is broken into fiction and
nonfiction categories, with a prize winner emerging from each category.
Messrs Adesanmi and
Ojaide are shortlisted for nonfiction, while Ezeanya is in the fiction
category. Organisers had called for entries of unpublished full length
works of between 60,000 and 100,000 words in length. Approximately 300
submissions were received from authors across the continent.
Others on the
shortlist are Ellen Banda Aaku (Zambia), Moraa Gitaa (Kenya), Shubnum
Khan (South Africa), Isabella Morris (South Africa), and Mukoma wa
Ngugi (Kenya, shortlisted for last year’s Caine Prize) in the fiction
category; and South African writers Andrew Barlow, Ruth Carneson, Ahmed
Mortiar, Anli Serfontein, and Tebogo Tlharipe, for non-fiction.
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