2026 Shortlist
We are delighted to present the 2026 Shortlist. Five stories selected from over four hundred submissions.
"These five shortlisted stories stood out with their originality. Each author packed a powerful punch in their storytelling with tales that were poignant, shocking, moving and even quirky. Congratulations to them all.”
Bola Mosuro, Chair of Judges
2026 Shortlist
Gladwell Pamba
Kenya
Gladwell Pamba is a PhD student at Concordia University Canada, from where she also holds an MA in Creative Writing. She was the winner of Ibua Manuscript Prize in 2024 and Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction in 2025. She has previously been awarded fellowships including the Oxbelly Writers Retreat, International Literary Seminars and The African Writers’ Trust. Gladwell’s works are anthologized while others appear in Iskanchi Press, Bakwa, North West Review, Waxwing Journal, The Offing, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Melara Mvogdobo
Cameroon
Melara Mvogdobo was born in Lucerne in 1972. After studying education and giving birth to three sons, she lived in the Dominican Republic, Cameroon and back in Switzerland. In addition to her writing, she taught traumatised young people and led workshops on textile handicrafts and tropical cuisine. In 2022, she moved to Andalusia with her family. In 2023, her first novel "Von den fünf Schwestern, die auszogen, ihren Vater zu ermorden" (Edition 8, Zurich) was published. Her second novel, "Grandmothers", was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize 2025, published in German in 2025 by Transit Verlag.
Akinwande Jordan
Nigeria
Akinwande Remilekun Jordan is a Nigerian writer, critic, and editor whose work moves between cinema, literature, culture, and politics. His writing is preoccupied with the ways art reflects and contests the social worlds that produce it, with particular attention to African cinema, popular culture, gender, power, and the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and ideology.
His criticism and essays have appeared in The 49th Street Magazine, What Kept Me Up, Saharan Style, Screen in Transit, and Black Film Wire, where he works as a writer and editor. He has written on Nigerian and African cinema, contemporary culture, feminism, and the politics of representation, while his broader literary work includes fiction and poetry. He lives and writes in Nigeria.
Yasmine Zohdi
Egypt
Yasmine Zohdi is a writer, translator and film critic based in Cairo, Egypt. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. A former culture editor at the independent news website Mada Masr and an alumna of Berlinale Talent Press, Zohdi is interested in the intersections between literary and cinematic forms, and how they continue to inform one another. She was an inaugural fellow of the Fiction Writers’ Program at the 2023 Oxbelly Retreat. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Bidoun, ArabLit and The Republic, among others. She is currently working on her first novel.
Simbarashe Kundizeza
Zimbabwe
Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza is a Zimbabwean writer based in Harare. His debut novel manuscript, Freelance, won the 2024 Island Prize for Debut African Fiction. He is an alumnus of the 2025 LOATAD Black Atlantic Residency, and a finalist in the 2018 Africa Book Club Short Story Competition. His work has appeared in Transition Magazine (Issue 131), The Wrong Patient and Other Stories from Africa anthology, and The Shallow Tales Review. He currently serves as an Associate Editor at African Writer Magazine.
THE STORIES
Read the shortlisted stories.
Gladwell Pamba
Melara Mvogdobo
Akinwande Jordan
Yasmine Zhodi
Simbarashe Kudizeza
One story, chosen each year from across a continent & its diaspora
We asked each publisher to share their thoughts.
FROM THE PUBLISHERS
“As the Jahazi Press team, we are still ecstatic and, a little in disbelief that The Last Shop by Gladwell Pamba, published in Let’s Conspire and Other Stories, has been shortlisted for this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing.
“Four years ago, with Saseni, we launched a short story workshop, our first full publishing process from development to print. Most of our work has involved reviving established Kenyan texts.
“Kenyan writing is shifting away from political-realist approaches toward the more psychologically oriented. The Last Shop is one of the finest short stories in this new vein. It is also relatively unique in its turn from being Nairobi-biased, in its rural Kenyan setting.
“Seeing this story reach the shortlist is deeply affirming.”
Ahmed Aidarus, Founder, Jahazi Press
01
Axel Timo Purr, Editor, Literatur.Review
02
“We are delighted that Melara Mvogdobo’s ‘Dieu Merci!’ has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize. At Literatur.Review, we believe that one of the essential tasks of a literary magazine today is to create space for voices and stories that too often remain outside the focus of the established literary market. Our annual summer special brings together previously unpublished or untranslated fiction from the Global North and Global South, allowing stories to travel across languages, borders and literary cultures. To see a story we published as part of this series recognised by the Caine Prize is therefore not only a wonderful acknowledgement of Melara Mvogdobo’s work, but also a deeply encouraging affirmation of what Literatur.Review stands for.”
Kingsley Alumona, Editor, Naira Books
03
”As editors of the short story ‘So Long Now It’s Starting To Look Like Eternity’ by Akinwande Jordan, published in the anthology, A House That’s Not A Home, what struck Haliru Ali Musa and I about the story, right from the first paragraph, was the uniqueness of the language that reads like poetry and its pace that is consistent, leading us to an unfamiliar territory. The theme of the story, poetically captured well in its title, is a complex one that many married couples face in contemporary society. I like the way the author managed the plot and ended the story, leaving us wondering what could have come next.”
Chigozie Obioma, Fiction Editor, The Republic
04
“When we launched the fiction section at The Republic, we had one goal in mind: to find and publish the best short fiction coming out of Africa and published in Africa but available to the world. Yasmine Zohdi’s “The Absence of Stains” was one of the stories in the very first issue. That this story is powerful is an understatement; it is in many ways a masterpiece. We are thrilled to have published this young Egyptian author and doubly excited to see it shortlisted for the 2026 Caine Prize!”
Nzube Nlebedim, Founder & Editor, The Shallow Tales Review
05
“To be shortlisted for any writers’ prize speaks first to the strength of the artist’s will—and then to the story itself. The Blue Fighter presses on. We’re humbled and excited for what’s coming.”