Caine Prize goes to Kenyan

The fourth Caine Prize for African Writing has been won by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor from Kenya, for ‘Weight of Whispers’ from Kwani?, Nairobi (2003).

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and gained a BA in Linguistics in English & History from Jomo Kenyatta University. She then attended the University of Reading, where she studied for an MA in TV/Video Development. Yvonne has written a screenplay for the Africa Script Development Fund (Harare) and is currently an Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

The result was announced by Chair of the judges, Dr Abdulrazak Gurnah, at a dinner held on July 14 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Gurnah, from Zanzibar, was also on last year’s panel of judges and teaches literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, of which ‘Paradise’ was short listed for the 1994 Booker Prize.

"The shortlisted stories in this year’s Caine Prize were all worthy winners in their own right," said Dr Gurnah. "‘Weight of Whispers’ is a story narrated by an aristocratic Rwandan Refugee in the aftermath of the 1994 massacres. Its great strength is the subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the condition of the refugee and also successfully incorporates so many large issues."

Also on the shortlist were:

• Ken Barris (South Africa), for ‘Clubfoot’ from Modern South African Stories, AD Donker Publishers, Johannesburg and Cape Town (2002);
• Emmanuel Dongala (Congo), for ‘Ouagadougou’ from Transition, Duke University Press, USA (Issue 86, 2000);
• Rachelle Greeff (South Africa), for ‘Tell Him it is Never Too Late’ from Modern South African Stories, AD Donker Publishers, Johannesburg and Cape Town (2002);
• George Makana Clark (Zimbabwe), for ‘A is for Ancestors’, from Transition, Duke University Press, USA (Issue 84, 2000).

Last year’s Prize was awarded to Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, for ‘Discovering Home’, from G21Net, an internet site. Wainaina has since been accepted for a graduate course in creative writing at University of East Anglia in England and signed up by London agents Curtis Brown. He has set up Kenya's only literary magazine to publish work by new Kenyan writers, Kwani?, and one of its first stories was Yvonne Adhiambo’s ‘Weight of Whispers’.

The Prize, awarded annually for African creative writing, is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years.

The other judges on this year’s panel were Shirley Chew PhD, Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds; John Sutherland PhD, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and visiting professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology and Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Phd, Senior Lecturer in African Literatures, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, all of whom are widely published.