Winner of the Caine Prize 2007 announced

Uganda’s Monica Arac de Nyeko has won the 2007 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for Jambula Tree from ‘African Love Stories’, Ayebia Clarke Publishing 2006. The Chair of Judges, Jamal Mahjoub from Sudan, announced Monica as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday, 9 July) in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Jamal Mahjoub described her story as “a witty and touching portrait of a community which is affected forever by a love which blossoms between two adolescents”.

Monica Arac de Nyeko was born in Uganda . She studied at Makerere and Groningen universities for a degree in Education and an MA in Humanitarian Assistance. She is a member of the Uganda Women Writers Association (FEMRITE), was a literature and English language teacher at St Mary College, Kisubi, an Early Warning Consultant in Rome and later a Reports Officer in Khartoum. She has been a Fellow on the British Council’s Crossing Borders programme and was also shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2004 for Strange Fruit. Her short stories Jazz, Miracles and Dreams and City Link are soon to be published.

Also on this year’s shortlist were:

Uwem Akpan (Nigeria), ‘My Parents Bedroom’ The New Yorker June 12, 2006

E.C Osondu (Nigeria) ‘Jimmy Carter’s Eyes’, AGNI Fiction Online 2006

Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa) ‘Bad Places’, New Contrast vol 31 no4 Spring 2003

Ada Udechukwu (Nigeria) ‘Night Bus’, The Atlantic Monthly, August 2006

Kenyan Billy Kahora’s ‘Treadmill Love’ from ‘The Obituary Tango’ Jacana/New Internationalist 2006, came in as highly commended by this year’s judges.

This year the winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize will take up a month’s residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC , as a ‘Caine Prize/Georgetown University Writer-in-Residence’. The award will cover all travel and living expenses.