For an outstanding paper in African literary studies by a graduate student. The award comes with a $250 cash prize.
2024 Winner: Cristovão Nwachukwu – “(Un)rooted Spaces of Belonging: Migrant Kinship Structures in Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy.”
2023 Winner: Shannon Cupido ⎻ “Ties That Bind: Black Tax and the Unmaking of Neoliberal Subjectivity”
Honorable Mention: Katherine J. Gutierrez-Glik ⎻ “Transgender Time & Space in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater”
2022 Winner: Elizabeth Abena Osei ⎻ “She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading herself”: Post Censorship, Afrofuturist Elements and Re-purposing Traditional African Elements in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber
2020 Winner: Katherine Hummel ⎻ “Spatial Entanglements: Reading Ecologies of Infrastructure in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road”
2019 Winners:
Martha Bannikov ⎻ "Digital Environments and Precarious Perforances in the Namibian Facebook Narrative 'The Dream of a Kwanyama Girl'"
Amaud Tcheoutou ⎻ “L’hymn nationale L’hymne national du Cameroun: Un chant patriotique sans ancrage géo-identitaire”
2017 Winner: Susanna Sacks
"Digital Voices: Negotiating Global Forms and Local Identity in Cape Town Performance Poetry”
2014 Winner: Megan Cole Paustian
"'A Real Heaven on Their Own Earth' Religious Missions, African Writing, and the Anticolonial Imagination"
Honorable Mention: Jonathon Coplen Rose ⎻ "Laughing across a Social Divide: Corruption and Class in Pieter-Dirk Uys's MacBeki"
See this year's Call for Nominations in Announcements for the dates and details on the next competition.