BRITISH-BORN NIGERIAN WRITER, LESLEY NNEKA WINS THE 20TH EDITION OF THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING

British-born Nigerian writer Lesley Nneka Arimah has won the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story ‘Skinned’. She emerged from a shortlist of five writers, that also included another Nigerian, Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor, who wrote “All Our Lives”.

Others on the shortlist were; Meron Hadero (Ethiopia) for ‘The Wall’, Cherrie Kandie (Kenya) for ‘Sew My Mouth’, Ngwah-Mbo Nana Nkweti (Cameroon) for ‘It Takes A Village Some Say’.

The Caine Prize for African Writing is a literature prize awarded to an African writer of a short story published in English. The prize was launched in 2000 to encourage and highlight the richness and diversity of African writing by bringing it to a wider audience internationally. The focus on the short story reflects the contemporary development of the African story-telling tradition.