Abioseh Porter Best Essay Award

For an outstanding article in African literary studies published in a
major peer-reviewed journal in the preceding calendar year. The award
comes with a $250 cash prize.

2023 Winner: Julia Borst, "Imagining Afrodescendance and the African Diaspora in Spain: Re/Decentering Belonging in Literature, Photography, and Film," Research in African Literatures Vol. 52, No. 2 (2021), 168-197

Honorable mentions: Dorothée Boulanger ⎻ “’Expanding the Present’: Utopianism and the Celebration of the Subaltern in Angolan Literature” (Research in African Literatures); Arthur Onipede Hollist ⎻ “The Critic as Novelist: Migrating Between Writing Genres, Execution, Executing, and Self-Determination in Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging is Announced” (The Journal of the African Literature Association)

2022 Winner: Georgia Nasseh, "And I Slip Into it Unawares': The Function of Bilingualism in Kobena Sekyi," Research in African Literatures Vol. 51, No. 2 (2020), 135-148

2020 Winner: Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, “Self-publishing
in the Era of Military Rule in Nigeria,” Journal of African Cultural Studies
Vol. 32, No. 2, 212-230.

2020 Winner: Ernest Cole, “Decentering Anthropocentrism:
Human-animal Relations in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness
Journal of the African Literature Association

12.3 (2018) 287-305.

2019 Winner: Matthew Eatough, “African Science Fiction
and the Planning Imagination”
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry

4.2 (2017) 237-257.

2018 Winner: Kanika Batra, "“Worlding Sexualities under
Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism.” Postcolonial Studies 19.1 (2016) 37-52.

2017 Winner: James Yeku, “'Akpos don come
again': Nigerian Cyberpop Hero as Trickster.”
Journal of African Cultural Studies 28:3 (2016): 245-261.

2016 Winner: Cajetan N. Iheka, “Colo-mentality: Colonial
Trauma in Oyono’s Houseboy and Condé’s
Crossing the Mangrove.”
Research in African Literatures 45.4 (Winter 2014): 33-49.

See this year's Call for Nominations in
Announcements for the dates and details on the next competition.