African writers, Erica Sugo Anyadike and Alice Gichuru have been announced to be on the shortlist of the 2019 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in the fiction and life-writing category respectively.
Erica Sugo Anyadike has worked as filmmaker and a broadcaster for over ten years. She’s Tanzanian, married to a Nigerian. She lived in South Africa for over a decade before moving to Nairobi, Kenya. While her counterpart, Alice Gichuru is Kenyan and participant at the 2017 Miles Morland Creative Writing Workshop.
The Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize which debuted about a decade ago, saw a record breaking entries from forty six countries this year, almost doubling the submissions from earlier years.
The prize which was increased from £300 to £1,000, will also publish winners in the various categories in Wasafiri and offer participation in the Chapter and Verse or Free Reads mentoring schemes in partnership with The Literary Consultancy (dependent on eligibility).
The judging panel which spoke with admiration and content for the shortlisted works are; Louise Doughty (fiction judge), Nikesh Shukla (life writing judge), Warsan Shire (poetry judge).
Read the shortlists in the various categories below;
Fiction judged by Louise Doughty
- Susan Downer (UK) ‘Gathering’
- Alicia Mietus (UK) ‘Third Person Female’
- Prateek Nigam (India) ‘Less Than Perfect’
- Erica Sugo Anyadike (Kenya) ‘How to Marry an African President’
- James Young (UK) ‘Hard Borders’
Life writing judged by Nikesh Shukla
- Hannah Austin (UK) ‘Natural Causes’
- Sofia Batchelor (UK) ‘Human Resources’
- Alice Gichuru (Kenya) ‘The Perfect Handspring’
- David McVey (UK) ‘A Losing School Team’
- Janet Olearski (Portugal) ‘Smokers’
Poetry by Warsan Shire
- Emily Franklin (United States) ‘Japan, Autumn’
- Miriama Gemmell (New Zealand) ‘family tree’
- Joanna Johnson (Spain) ‘Pantoum of Soldiers’
- Desiree Seebaran (Trinidad and Tobago) ‘Picong’
- Thomas Waller (UK) ‘Diaries from the Third Millenium’
The winners will be announced on the 9th of November, 2019 at a ceremony marking the 35th birthday of Wasafiri in the UK.
