Is the Caine Prize for Emergent African Writing, or the Best African Writing? | Literary Hub

If the Caine Prize helps apprentice individual writers into the profession, it only does this at the individual level. At the level of the literature as a whole, in fact - to the extent that it makes any sense to talk about African literature as a totality - it may do precisely the opposite, producing the conditions for a stagnating field. By focusing on emerging writers who write short stories, the most prominent prize for African literature therefore tends to privilege and promote writers only at the earliest stage of their career, celebrating them when they are relatively less accomplished. In this way, by drawing annual attention to African literature only, always, and still, as a story of transition, the Caine Prize contributes to making that the endless single story of the literature. To the extent that short stories are a warm-up for writing novels, in other words, the Caine Prize celebrates and rewards potential and promise more than accomplishment and arrival; the highest prize for African literature is a prize for writers who have not yet "emerged."