PREVIOUS WINNERS

• 2010: Olufemi Terry
• 2009: E C Osondu
• 2008: Henrietta Rose-Innes
• 2007: Monica Arac de Nyeko
• 2006: Mary Watson
• 2005: SA Afolabi
• 2004: Brian Chikwava
• 2003: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
• 2002: Binyavanga Wainaina
• 2001: Helon Habila
• 2000: Leila Aboulela

2001 winner: HELON HABILA

Helon’s Prison Stories, which included his Caine Prize winning story, was re-edited as a novel by Penguin/Hamish Hamilton and republished as Waiting for an Angel. It won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel (African Region) in March 2003 and was published by W W Norton in the States. The Observer named it one of the top five debut novels of 2002. Helon’s second novel, Measuring Time, written as a writer in residence at the University of East Anglia, was also published by Penguin / Hamish Hamilton and W W Norton. Hamish Hamilton published his latest novel, Oil on Water, in August 2010 and Helon has just edited The Granta Book of the African Short Story. Helon now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Virginia.

PREVIOUS SHORTLISTED WRITERS

• Abdourahman Waberi (Djibouti), shortlisted in 2000, published his novel Passage of Tears with Seagull Books in 2011, distributed in the USA by the University of Chicago Press.
• George Makana Clark (Zimbabwe), shortlisted in 2003, published his first novel The Raw Man with Jonathan Cape in April 2011. He is shortlisted for the Newton First Book Award.
• Lily Mabura (Kenya), shortlisted in 2010, will publish a collection of short stories with Pearson in 2012.
• Rory Kilalea (Zimbabwe), shortlisted in 2000 and 2002, won a BBC World Service African Performance prize in 2004 for his half-hour drama for radio, Colours, which he wrote at the Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop in 2003.
• Doreen Baingana (Uganda) is the Managing Editor of StoryMoja in Nairobi.  Containing stories shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2004 and 2005, her collection of short stories, Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award (Africa region). It was also awarded an Associated Writers and Writing Programmes Award for short fiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Doreen is also taking part in the Chinua Achebe Center’s ‘Pilgrimages’ project and is travelling to Hargeisa in Somaliland this summer, with the goal of producing a book about her experiences.
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), shortlisted in 2002, won the Commonwealth First Book Prize for her novel Purple Hibiscus, published by Harper Perennial, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004. Chimamanda won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction, with her most recently published novel Half of a Yellow Sun. A collection of her short stories The Thing Around Your Neck was published by Fourth Estate in 2009.
• Hassounah Mosbahi (Tunisia), shortlisted in 2001, features in Sardines and Oranges, a collection of short stories from North Africa published by Banipal in 2005.
• Chika Unigwe (Nigeria), shortlisted in 2004, was shortlisted in 2006 for the Dutch equivalent of the Orange Prize for her novel translated into Dutch, de fenicks. She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for her story Borrowed Smile, a Commonwealth Short Story Award for Weathered Smiles and a Flemish literary prize for De Smaak van Sneeuw.  Her second novel, On Black Sisters’ Street, first written and published in Dutch, was published in Chika’s own English version by Jonathan Cape in 2009.
• Sefi Atta (Nigeria), shortlisted in 2006, is the author of novels Everything Good Will Come and Swallow and the short story collection News From Home. Winner of the PEN International 2004/5 David T.K. Wong Prize, she also won the first Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2006 for Everything Good Will Come, and the final NOMA Award for Publishing in Africa in 2009 for Lawless and other stories, now published as News From Home. Her publishers include Interlink Books in the USA, AAA Press in Nigeria and Jacana Media in South Africa.
• Laila Lalami (Morocco), also shortlisted in 2006, published a short story collection Hope and Other Pursuits (2005) and had her first novel, Secret Son, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2009. Her work has been translated into ten languages.  She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside.
• Gill Schierhout (South Africa), shortlisted in 2008, had her first novel, The Shape of Him, published by Jonathan Cape in 2009.
• Parselelo Kantai (Kenya), shortlisted in 2004 and 2009 is one of Africa’s leading investigative journalists. He held a Reuters Fellowship for his nonfiction and completed an MFA in Creative writing at the University of London. He contributes to the Financial Times and The East African, amongst many others and recently penned “The Rainbow Nation through African Eyes” for The Africa Report (June/July 2010).
• Uwem Akpan (Nigeria) was shortlisted in 2007. His book Say You’re One of Them was published by Little Brown.  It won the Best First Book award in the Africa region of the Commonwealth Literature Prize and was critically acclaimed by Oprah Winfrey on Oprah’s Book Club in 2009 prompting it to reach the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
• Alistair Morgan (South Africa) shortlisted in 2009 "Icebergs" was also awarded The Plimpton Prize by the Paris Review and received an O.Henry award. His debut novel, Sleeper’s Wake, was published in the UK by Granta.

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