Rotimi Babatunde wins 13th Caine Prize for African Writing

The Chair of Judges, Bernardine Evaristo MBE, announced Rotimi Babatunde as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday, 2 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Bernardine Evaristo said: “Bombay's Republic vividly describes the story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma campaign of World War Two. It is ambitious, darkly humorous and in soaring, scorching prose exposes the exploitative nature of the colonial project and the psychology of Independence.”

Rotimi Babatunde’s fiction and poems have been published in Africa, Europe and America in journals which include Die Aussenseite des Elementes and Fiction on the Web and in anthologies including Little Drops and A Volcano of Voices. He is a winner of the Meridian Tragic Love Story Competition organised by the BBC World Service and his plays have been staged and presented by institutions which include the Halcyon Theatre, Chicago and the Institute for Contemporary Arts. He is currently taking part in a collaboratively produced piece at the Royal Court and the Young Vic as part of World Stages for a World City. Rotimi lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Also shortlisted were:

• Billy Kahora (Kenya) ‘Urban Zoning’ from ‘McSweeney’s’ Vol. 37 (San Francisco, 2011) www.mcsweeneys.net

• Stanley Kenani (Malawi) ‘Love on Trial’ from ‘For Honour and Other Stories’ published by eKhaya/Random House Struik (Cape Town, 2011) www.prickofthespindle.com

• Constance Myburgh (South Africa) ‘Hunter Emmanuel’ from ‘Jungle Jim’ Issue 6, (Cape Town, 2011) www.junglejim.org

The panel of judges is chaired by Bernardine Evaristo, the award-winning author of six books of fiction and verse fiction. Her new novel, Mr Loverman, will be published by Penguin 2013. She is a literary critic, teaches creative writing at Brunel University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.

Alongside Bernardine on the panel of judges this year are cultural journalist Maya Jaggi, Zimbabwean poet, songwriter and writer Chirikure Chirikure, Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC Samantha Pinto, and the Sudanese CNN television correspondent Nima Elbagir.

Once again the winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize will be given the opportunity of taking up a month’s residence at Georgetown University, as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. The award will cover all travel and living expenses. The winner will also be invited to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September 2012 and events hosted by the Museum of African Art in New York in November 2012.

Last year the Caine Prize was won by Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. She has subsequently been awarded the highly regarded two-year Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University, in the United States and her debut novel, We Need New Names, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in North America and Chatto and Windus in the UK.

Previous winners are Sudan’s Leila Aboulela (2000), Nigerian Helon Habila (2001), Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Kenyan Yvonne Owuor (2003), Zimbabwean Brian Chikwava (2004), Nigerian Segun Afolabi (2005), South African Mary Watson (2006), Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko (2007), South African Henrietta Rose-Innes (2008), Nigerian EC Osondu (2009) and Sierra Leonean Olufemi Terry (2010).

-Ends-

Dates for the Diary
The 2012 Caine Prize winner will be in conversation with Nii Parkes, Jose Eduardo Agualusa and Dinaw Mengistu, in the Southbank Centre’s Level 5 Function Room on Tuesday, 3 July at 6.30pm. A seminar on African Writing will also be held on Wednesday, 4 July at 1pm at the Anatomy Museum, King’s College London. Rotimi will also take part in an event at Manchester Art Gallery on Thursday, 5 July at 8pm, part of the public programme for We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today.

Notes to Editors
The Caine Prize, awarded annually for African creative 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 Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3,000 to 10,000 words). An “African writer” is normally taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African.
The African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee, are Patrons of The Caine Prize, as is Chinua Achebe, winner of the Man Booker International Prize. Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is President of the Council, Ben Okri OBE is Vice President, Jonathan Taylor CBE is the Chairman and Ellah Allfrey OBE is the Deputy Chairperson.
The stories written at Caine Prize workshops are published annually alongside the Prize’s shortlisted stories by New Internationalist (UK), Jacana Media (South Africa), Cassava Republic (Nigeria), Kwani? (Kenya), and this year’s new co-publishers: Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana), FEMRITE (Uganda), and Bookworld Publishers (Zambia). Books are available from the publishers or from the Africa Book Centre, African Books Collective or Amazon.
The New Internationalist edition was published on 1 July 2012. (ISBN 978-1-78026-074-7 print; ISBN 978-1-78026-075-4 ebook)
The Caine Prize is principally sponsored by The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Booker Prize Foundation, Weatherly International plc, China Africa Resources, CSL Stockbrokers and Miles Morland. Other funders include the British Council, The Beit Trust, The Thistle Trust, the Royal Overseas League and Kenya Airways.

For further information, photos or to arrange interviews, please contact:

Jenny Casswell
Raitt Orr & Associates
Tel: 0207 836 4644 / Mob: 07796 131447
[email][email protected]

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