Nima Elbagir, Judge 2012, International Correspondent for CNN

Whenever I travel around the continent or when I meet fellow Africans elsewhere around the world and they find out I’m a journalist I’m invariably asked the same question; why does the news out of Africa always have to be so unrelentingly bad?

It’s not.

Even just at CNN we have three separate Africa feature strands and so do many of our competitors but I can understand why people still feel this way.

For years it felt like there was only one narrative when it came to Africa and it was not a narrative that we as Africans had any control over.

That has changed as more and more Africans have picked up pens and cameras and taken ownership of their stories.

Reading through the Caine Prize entries really brought home to me what that ownership has brought with it; a conviction that our stories - whether the real or the imagined - have value.

I said at the beginning of the judging that I was looking for stories that were informed by an "Africanness" but managed to avoid the cliched and predictable.

Nebulous I know but I found that and more.

None of these stories carried the baggage of Africa the unfamiliar or Africa the “exotic”.

None relied on the niche or the novel to carry the reader with them. Instead there was a real confidence that their voices – unwatered down to pander to a ”western” palate- were compelling enough, that the truths universal.

Samantha Pinto, Judge 2012, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University

Besides seconding everything that Bernardine Evaristo, in her inaugural Caine Prize blog post, had to say about the Caine Prize and African writing, it is hard to know what to add.  As a second-time judge (my first go-round was 2010), I appreciate her candor and her passion for African writing that does not fit the expected mold.   And as a professor of African literature at Georgetown, an American university, I think about how the West imagines Africa every day.  

Now, challenging others’ ideas about the continent is certainly not the job or primary concern of an African writer. But it is my job, explicitly, every time I teach contemporary African literature and culture. So it is with that in mind that I approach the Caine Prize entries. How are these stories engaging and representing the diversity and innovation of modern African culture?  How do these stories draw in line with the classics of contemporary African literature, and how might they also or instead relate to other forms of media on the continent, from Nollywood to Kwani? to genre fiction?  Where would I place them on a syllabus—and how can I imagine my students receiving them?  Does the writing, in form and/or in content, give us something new and substantial to read, something not easily forgotten?

The Caine Prize has the potential to say “yes” to this last question every year with its shortlist and its winning story.   In this, its generic rules itself are in line with our global, technologically advanced times.  As Jackie Kay, a Scottish writer of African descent, said recently in the Guardian, "I think the short story is perfect for our time, and perfect for people's time . . . You can read a short story in your lunch hour or before you go to sleep and it's a complete experience. You can carry the story around with you in your head and if you put it down in a large field it should still glow because of its intensity."   I hope as a judge to find this intensity in the short fiction submitted for the Caine Prize;  I hope as a teacher that my students learn to carry some of these beautifully crafted stories into a much larger conversation about Africa than the one that exists in mainstream American media.

Bernardine Evaristo, Chair of Judges 2012, writer and poet

The Caine Prize has been instrumental in revitalizing African fiction, through both the prize and its annual creative writing workshops in Africa. We must remind ourselves that twelve years ago it seemed to be almost impossible for new African writers to get published beyond the continent, and certainly not in the UK. I can now think of scores of fiction writers published internationally in the past decade, many of whom have been touched, in some way, by the Caine Prize and its workshops.

So this prize is more than just another award that will sprinkle fairy dust on a single, lucky writer every year  – it is a force for change; it heralds what is new, excellent and exciting in short African fiction, which is usually a stepping stone to the longer form – the novel. This is why the responsibility involved in chairing this particular prize is greater than usual. There are five of us judges from the Sudan, Zimbabwe, the UK and USA and we are currently whittling down the entries. Who knows what stories will gain enough consensus to make the shortlist, a consensus based on our shared understanding of what constitutes top quality literature that, in my previous judging experience, might not accommodate maverick writing and interests.

I’m looking for stories about Africa that enlarge our concept of the continent beyond the familiar images that dominate the media: War-torn Africa, Starving Africa, Corrupt Africa - in short: The Tragic Continent. I’ve been banging on about this for years because while we are all aware of these negative realities, and some African writers have written great novels along these lines (as was necessary, crucial), isn’t it time now to move on? Or rather, for other kinds of African novels to be internationally celebrated. What other aspects of this most heterogeneous of continents are being explored through the imaginations of writers?

I’m also looking for stories that display a strong, original streak, a writer who has a narrative voice, command of craft and ways of seeing that are different, fresh. I’d rather a story is provocative and unsettling rather than familiar, safe and perfectly accomplished. Yet risk-takers are rare. Among the submissions I’ve encountered a lot of uninspired prose that feels so dated, so Middle England circa 1950s, even though it might have been written in Central Africa in 2012. Luckily there are a few adventurers too. But we need more experimentation and daring, stunning image-makers and linguistic explorers who might, for example, infuse English with an African language or syntax. Not necessarily pidgin, but perhaps something else, something new – the English language (and forms) adapted, mutated, re-invented to suit African perspectives and cultures.

The age-old question remains – are too many African writers writing for the approval of non-African readerships, such as the big, international markets in Europe and America? It is understandable, of course, because these are the predominant publishing outlets. Certainly in Britain the taste-makers are, almost without exception, not African in origin. I ask myself - to what extent does published African fiction pander to received notions about the continent, and at what cost? How might this contract the imagination and reduce expectations for readers and writers alike.

For African fiction to remain more than a passing fad on the world stage it needs to diversify more than it does at present. What about crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, more history, chick lit? To be as diverse as, for example, European literature and its myriad manifestations. Imagine if the idea of ‘European Literature’ only evoked novels about the holocaust, communist gulags and twentieth century dictatorships. I’m looking forward to the time when the concept of ‘African literature’ also cannot be defined; when it equates to infinite possibilities and, as with Europe, there are thousands of disparate, published writers, with careers at every level and reaching every kind of reader.  

Ben Okri will announce the 2012 shortlist on 1st May!

Waigwa Ndiangui talks to Lizzy Attree about the 2012 workshop and his short story "Bloody Buda".

Mehul Gohil talks to Lizzy Attree about the 2012 workshop and his short story "Elephants Chained to Big Kennels".  Read his blog about his experience in South Africa here: http://aideedystopia.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/gorillas-report-of-the-2012-caine-prize-workshop/

Workshop 2012 - South Africa

This year's Caine Prize workshop was held at Volmoed in South Africa, near Hermanus.  Although it was my first year attending as Administrator, Jamal Mahoub, who has worked on a number of the previous workshops thought it was the most comfortable place the workshops have ever been held.  Is comfort conducive to the potentially torturous writing process?  Essentially a religious retreat Volmoed is hidden in the valley of Heaven and Earth near Hermanus, nestled between vineyards and farmland  http://www.volmoed.co.za/ was blessed with blue skies and sunshine, spacious cottages with stoeps and a wonderful cook who catered for our lunches and dinners every day.  I was tempted to switch off the hot water to make the writers suffer sufficiently to produce great works of art (and reproduce some of the conditions of previous workshops), but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  So with all their comforts provided for, in fact all the writers had to do was write...


The workshop almost went off without a hitch, except two of the Nigerians invited were prevented from attending by the South Africa immigration authorities.  Elnathan John was not granted a visa and Abubakar Ibrahim was deported on arrival in Johannesburg because the authorities were not prepared to accept his yellow fever certificate: http://dailytimes.com.ng/article/sa-deports-nigerian-journalist  Despite this, the ten writers who did attend were perhaps in for more of an ordeal.  Starting on the third evening each writer would read part of their story in progress to all the other writers, and the two animateurs, acclaimed South African writer and 2008 Caine Prize winner Henrietta Rose-Innes and award winning writer of mixed British/Sudanese heritage, Jamal Mahjoub.  The rounds of praise and criticism received after dinner helped to shape the stories which were then revisited the following week when they were closer to completion.  In the meantime the writers consulted in private with Jamal and Henrietta who offered guidance on structure and direction, acting as editors and facilitators, or midwives...  


All ten writers are under pressure to meet the ten day deadline to complete a short story each of between 3,000 and 10,000 words, which is then published in the 2012 Caine Prize anthology along with the 2012 shortlisted stories that will be announced in the first week of May.  Next year all the workshop stories are entered in to the 2013 Caine Prize and stand a chance of winning £10,000.  As Brenda says in the clip uploaded below, the pressure was intense.  


In the next few days we'll upload a few more film clips so you can see what the writers themselves thought of the workshop plus a few teasers about the stories they wrote which will be published in time for this year's Caine Prize award announcement on 2nd July.