South African writer Nadia Davids has been announced as the winner of the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing!
The Caine Prize is awarded annually for a short story by an African writer published in English. The winner of the prize receives £10,000 (about R233,000), and each shortlisted writer £500.
Davids has taken the prestigious prize for her short story ‘Bridling’, which was published in The Georgia Review in 2023.
Chair of judges Chika Unigwe said:
‘Bridling is an impressive achievement, a triumph of language, storytelling and risk-taking while maintaining a tightly controlled narrative about women who rebel. It embodies the spirit of the Caine Prize, which is to celebrate the richness and diversity of short stories by African writers. That is to say, to challenge the single story of African literature.’
Davids is a writer, theater-maker and scholar. Her plays (At Her Feet, What Remains, Hold Still) have been staged throughout Southern Africa and in Europe. Her debut novel, An Imperfect Blessing, was shortlisted for the UJ Prize for South African Writing and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Davids’ short fiction and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Zyzzyva Magazine. She has taught at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Cape Town and is the President Emeritus of PEN South Africa.
The Caine Prize, now in its twenty-fifth year, received a record-breaking number of submissions for 2024, with 320 entries from twenty-eight African countries: South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, Namibia, Morocco, Gambia, Senegal, Eritrea, Malawi, Liberia, Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Libya, Algeria and Cameroon.
Davids and the shortlisted writers, Tryphena Yeboah, Samuel Kolawole, Uche Okonkwo and Pemi Aguda, will have their stories featured in the 2024 Caine Prize anthology, Midnight In the Morgue and Other Stories, to be published by Cassava Republic Press. The collection will also include stories from this year’s Caine Prize workshop, which was held in Salima, Malawi.
This year the Caine Prize declared that it will ‘re-centre’ itself on the African continent, with a planned year-long celebration of the prize’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025. Events will include readings and discussions involving the shortlisted writers and past winners, and tributes to writers such as the late Charles Mungoshi (Zimbabwe), who was shortlisted in 2000, and the late Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya), who won the award in 2002.
