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
Related posts:
- Penguin Prize for African Writing Update!
- Alistair Morgan & Mukoma wa Ngugi Caine- Prize for African Writing – Shortlist
- Damon Galgut has won the 2008 University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing
- Call for Penguin African Writers Series Book Cover Submissions!
- Two Penguin Authors short listed for the UJ Literary Prize
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July 19th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Thanks for the update!
Normally with these things you never know whats happening until way after the closing date. So well done to you guys!
October 27th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Great idea to have a new prize available to writers. Thank you! The rules under each section state that ‘Entrants may submit only ONE submission.’ Does this mean we must choose between submitting either a non-fiction work or a fiction work, or are we allowed to submit one work in each of the two categories?