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Three Nigerian writers have been shortlisted as possible winners of the Inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing. Chika Ezeanya, Tanure Ojaide and NEXT columnist Pius Adesanmi feature on the shortlist of thirteen African writers. The prize comes with a cash award of R50000, 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. Organizers had called for entries of unpublished full length works of between 60,000 and 100,000 words in length.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.

Shortlisted alongside the Nigerian authors 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.

Judges for the fiction category are Kole Omotoso, Director, Africa Diaspora Research Group, Johannesburg, and judge for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Africa; Harry Garba, author, poet and associate professor, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town; and Elinor Sisulu, author and adviser on democracy and human rights issues in Zimbabwe.

Redi Diko, South African columnist and broadcaster; Nic Dawes, veteran investigative and political reporter, and editor-in-chief of the Mail and Guardian Weekly; and Jonathan Jansen, Scholar-in-Residence at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Johannesburg, and alumnus of Connell and Stamford Universities, will decide the winner of the Non-fiction category.

Winners of both categories will be announced on September 4, 2010 at the Mail and Guardian Literary Festival. Speaking on the rationale behind this maiden initiative, Penguin South Africa’s CEO Alison Lowry said, “Although this prize does not exclude established authors, we believe that there are new writers from Africa for whom Penguin can provide a platform, and in so doing we hope to reflect and showcase the diversity of voices on our continent both at home and abroad.”