Idza Luhumyo for ‘Five Years Next Sunday’
Kenyan writer Idza Luhumyo has been awarded the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story ‘Five Years Next Sunday’, published in Disruption (2021). This is the fifth time a Kenyan writer has won since the Prize’s inception in 2000.
The Chair of the AKO Caine Prize Judging Panel, author and award-winning journalist Okey Ndibe, announced the winner of the £10,000 prize at an award ceremony held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on Monday 18 July 2022.
Photo Credit: Dwaine Field-Pellew
The 2022 winning work, ‘Five Years Next Sunday’, which won the 2021 Short Story Day Africa Prize, is a story about a young woman with the unique power to call the rain in her hair. Feared by her family and community, a chance encounter with a foreigner changes her fortunes, but there are duplicitous designs upon her most prized and vulnerable possession.
Judging the Prize alongside Ndibe this year were French-Guinean author and academic Elisa Diallo; South African literary curator and co-founder of The Cheeky Natives Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane; UK-based Nigerian visual artist Ade ‘Àsìkò’ Okelarin; and Kenyan co-founder and managing trustee at Book Bunk Angela Wachuka.
Speaking of Luhumyo’s story, Okey Ndibe said:
“What we liked about the story was the mystical office of the protagonist, who is both ostracised and yet holds the fate of her community in her hair. She is stripped of agency by her immediate family, as well as the Europeans who give the impression of placing her on a pedestal, yet within that seeming absence of agency, and oppressive world, is her stubborn reclamation of herself. The dramatic tension in the story is so powerful and palpable that it’s like something you could cut with a knife.
‘Five Years Next Sunday’ is an incandescent story - its exquisite language wedded to the deeply moving drama of a protagonist whose mystical office invites animus at every turn. It’s that rare story that stays imprinted in the reader’s mind long after the encounter with it. A triumph of the imagination!”
Idza Luhumyo is a Kenyan writer. Her work has been published by Popula, Jalada Africa, The Writivism Anthology, Baphash Literary & Arts Quarterly, MaThoko's Books, Gordon Square Review, Amsterdam's ZAM Magazine, Short Story Day Africa, the New Internationalist, The Dark, and African Arguments. Her work has been shortlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize, the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship, and the Gerald Kraak Award. She is the inaugural winner of the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award (2020) and winner of the Short Story Day Africa Prize (2021).
‘Five Years Next Sunday’ is available to read now on the AKO Caine Prize website.
Joining Luhumyo on this year’s shortlist were:
Joshua Chizoma (Nigeria) for his story ‘Collector of Memories’, published in The Hope, The Prayer, The Anthem, Afritondo (2021). Read here.
Nana-Ama Danquah (Ghana) for her story ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, published in Accra Noir (Cassava Republic Press, UK & Commonwealth, Akashic Books, US, 2020). Read here.
Hannah Giorgis (Ethiopia) for her story ‘A Double-Edged Inheritance’, published in Addis Ababa Noir (Cassava Republic Press, UK & Commonwealth, Akashic Books, US, 2020). Read here.
Billie McTernan (Ghana) for her story ‘The Labadi Sunshine Bar’, published in Accra Noir (Cassava Republic Press, UK & Commonwealth, Akashic Books, US, 2020). Read here.
Each shortlisted writer receives £500 and will also be published in the 2022 AKO Caine Prize anthology.