FOUNDING

The AKO Caine Prize for African Writing is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc, who was Chairman of the 'Africa 95' arts festival in Europe and Africa in 1995 and for nearly 25 years Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee. After his death, friends and colleagues decided to establish a prize of £10,000 to be awarded annually in his memory.

FOUNDING PATRONS

PROFESSOR WOLE SOYINKA - PATRON 

Professor Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria and received his doctorate from the University of Leeds. He was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959 and in 1960 was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama.  At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of Comparative Literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz began writing when he was seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939 and ten more were written before the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, when he stopped writing for several years. One novel was republished in 1953, however, and the appearance of the Cairo Triology, Bayn al Qasrayn, Qasr al Shawq, Sukkariya (Between-the-Palaces, Palace of Longing, Sugarhouse) in 1957 made him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional urban life. With The Children of Gebelawi (1959), he began writing again, in a new vein that frequently concealed political judgements under allegory and symbolism. Works of this second period include the novels, The Thief and the Dogs (1961), Autumn Quail (1962), Small Talk on the Nile (1966), and Miramar (1967), as well as several collections of short stories.Until 1972, Mahfouz was employed as a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as consultant on Cultural Affairs to the Ministry of Culture. The years since his retirement from the Egyptian bureaucracy have seen an outburst of further creativity, much of it experimental. He is now the author of no fewer than thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles. Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt, each new publication is regarded as a major cultural event and his name is inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf.

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa. Her parents were Jewish immigrants; her father was from Latvia and her mother was from England. Nadine began writing at the age of nine, and was just 15 years old when her first work was published. The novel entitled The Conservationist (1974) gave her international breakthrough. Nadine Gordimer was involved in the anti-apartheid movement early on and several of her books were banned by the apartheid regime. She has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, since 1948. Nadine Gordimer's works include novels, short stories, and essays. During the 1960s and 1970s she wrote a number of novels set against the backdrop of the emerging resistance movement against apartheid, while the liberated South Africa provides the backdrop for her later works, written in the 1990s. The stories of individuals are always at the center of her narratives, in relation to external limitations and frameworks. As a whole, Nadine Gordimer's literary works create rich imagery of South Africa's historical development.

Professor JOHN COETZEE - PATRON

John Coetzee, born in South Africa, now an Australian resident, is a writer and academic. Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K and again in 1999 for Disgrace.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.  He served as a judge in 2001.

FOUNDING PRESIDENT & VICE-PRESIDENT OF COUNCIL

Baronness nicholson of winterbourne - FOUNDING PRESIDENT

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne was ennobled and took her seat as a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom Parliament in 1997, having also served as a Member of the House of Commons and, subsequently, in the European Parliament. Baroness Nicholson was married to Sir Michael Caine and established the Caine Prize in his memory in 1999.

BEN OKRI - FOUNDING VICE PRESIDENT

Poet and novelist Ben Okri OBE read Comparative Literature at Essex University. In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for The Famished Road. Ben Okri is Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN, a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2001. He served as the first chair of the judges in 2000 and was appointed Vice President in 2012.

FIRST CHAIR

Jonathan Taylor OBE

Jonathan Taylor was a member of the SOAS Governing Body from 1988 to 2005, serving as Chairman for the last six of those years. Since 2001 he has been chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, which awards the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the UK’s most prestigious literary honour. He is chair of the trustees of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

FIRST WINNER

Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo, grew up in Khartoum and moved in her mid-twenties to Aberdeen. She is the author of five novels, Bird Summons, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, The Kindness of Enemies, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her latest story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages and she was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio and her fiction included in publications such as Freeman’s, Granta and Harper’s Magazine.

FIRST ADMINISTRATOR

Nick Elam is a former British civil servant and the first administrator of the Caine Prize.

FIRST WINNER

Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo, grew up in Khartoum and moved in her mid-twenties to Aberdeen. She is the author of five novels, Bird Summons, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, The Kindness of Enemies, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her latest story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages and she was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio and her fiction included in publications such as Freeman’s, Granta and Harper’s Magazine.

FIRST DIRECTOR

Dr. Lizzy Attree is the co-founder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London. Blood on the Page, her collection of interviews with the first African writers to write about HIV and AIDS from Zimbabwe and South Africa, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2010. She is a Director on the board of Short Story Day Africa and was the Director of the Caine Prize from 2014 to 2018. In 2015, she taught African literature at Kings College, London and has since taught at Goldsmiths College and now teaches World Literature at Richmond. In 2018 she completed an Arts Council-funded project on African footballers at Chelsea and Arsenal and published the associated anthology of poems Thinking Outside the Penalty Box with the Poetry Society. She is also an honorary research associate in the Dept of Literary Studies in English, at Rhodes University, South Africa until 2020.