[London, UK] The Caine Prize for African Writing is pleased to announce its panel of judges for the 2025 Best of Caine Award, a special honorary award celebrating the most outstanding winner from the Prize’s 25-year history.
This year’s Chair of Judges is the 2021 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.
Gurnah is joined on the panel by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. She has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu (Oneworld, 2018), won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013 and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 'Let's Tell This Story Properly', which featured in her first collection, Manchester Happened (Oneworld, 2019). She was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction 2018 and lives in Manchester, where she lectures in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2020, she was selected as one of 100 Most Influential Africans of 2020 by New African magazine.
Joining the judges is also Tony Tagoe, a Ghanaian film producer, music executive, and creative strategist whose career spans music, film, brand partnerships, and cultural advocacy. An Oxford graduate, Tagoe co-founded Deal Real, the legendary Carnaby Street music store that became a launchpad for artists including Amy Winehouse, Kanye West, Mark Ronson, and John Legend. In artist management, Tagoe currently manages Grammy-winning producer Guilty Beatz and visual artist Prince Gyasi.
Tagoe’s film career includes co-producing Beasts of No Nation, Black Earth Rising and Borga, along with credits on Das Netz. His brand work spans Nike, Adidas, Sony, Mercedes Benz, Red Bull, Vodafone, Diageo, and Apple. He sits on the Global Citizen: Move Afrika Committee and Soho House Committee. He is Co- Founder of TDA Films and TD Akuna Studios.
Commenting on this year’s award, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chair of Judges, said: “for 25 years, the Caine Prize for African Writing has been at the forefront of both facilitating the emergence of new literary talent from the Continent, and honouring seasoned authors who push the needle in their approach to storytelling. It is undeniably an important pillar of the African literary ecosystem, offering not only its annual prize but also in-person workshops across the continent, and more recently, the online editorial programme.
“This year’s honorary award presents a unique opportunity for reflection, not just on the 25 stories and authors that have shaped the Prize’s legacy, but also on the years ahead, and the narratives the Prize seeks to platform. I am delighted to once again serve as Chair of Judges after over two decades since I last held this role. I have read each of the winning stories before, and it is clear how the diverse perspectives of past judging panels have shaped the selection of each winner. I now look forward to revisiting these stories through a fresh lens, alongside my esteemed fellow judges.”
The judges will convene to select one outstanding story from the 25 previous Caine Prize winners this September.
The Best of Caine honouree will be announced at the inaugural Words Across Waters: Afro Lit Fest, taking place on Saturday, 27 September 2025 at the British Library in London.
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About The Caine Prize for African Writing
The Caine Prize for African Writing is an annual award for African creative writing. The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3,000 to 10,000 words). The Caine Prize for African 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 African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka and J M Coetzee, are Patrons of The Caine Prize. Ellah Wakatama OBE is the Chair.
An African writer is taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or who has a parent who is African by birth or nationality. Works translated into English from other languages are not excluded, provided they have been published in translation, and should such a work win, a proportion of the prize would be awarded to the translator.