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PENGUIN BOOKS SOUTH AFRICA ANNOUNCES A NEW LITERARY AWARD
Penguin Prize for African Writing Update!
17th July 2009
Since we announced the prizes for fiction and non-fiction earlier this year we have been thrilled with the excitement that this has generated amongst writers in Africa and the African Diaspora. We deliberately allowed a long lead time for the prize entries to allow people to create work for the prize, but it does mean that we won’t really know what the entries look like until the last minute.
So far the fiction entries far outweigh the non-fiction entries – we have 24 fiction entries from writers from 7 different African countries but only 4 non-fiction entries from South Africa and Kenya.
Activity on blogs about African writing indicates that there has been some consternation about the exclusion of fantasy and science fiction in our criteria for the fiction prize. Our intention with this stipulation was to ensure that the winner is a novel that appeals to a broad audience and not only readers of a genre as specific as science fiction or fantasy. However we quite understand that much African fiction has elements of fantasy and we would not discriminate against the inclusion of such elements in any of the prize entries.
Other people have queried the exclusion of children’s fiction, we did this because the criteria by which you judge the potential of works aimed at children are so different to those aimed at adults that we didn’t see how we could judge them against one another.
Our publishing team are waiting on tenterhooks to see what other entries arrive in the next few months.
Louise Grantham
Publisher
Publisher
See below documents for the fiction and non-fiction prize criteria.
Penguin Prize for African Writing Fiction Criteria
Penguin Prize for African Writing Non Fiction Criteria
