Namwali Serpell scoops Caine prize

Zambian writer Namwali Serpell has won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and has pledged to share her £10 000 (about R200 000) prize with the runners-up, two of whom are South African.

After accepting the prize at a ceremony held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford earlier this month, Serpell told the BBC that her promise was “an act of mutiny”.

“I wanted to change the structure of the prize,” she said.

“It is very awkward to be placed into this position of competition with other writers that you respect immensely and you feel yourself put into a sort of American Idol or racehorse situation when actually, you all want to support each other.”

Serpell won the prize for a short story The Sack (from Africa39 published by Bloomsbury last year) that “explores a world where dreams and reality are both claustrophobic and dark”.

The runners-up who will share the prize are South Africans Masande Ntshanga – shortlisted earlier this year for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge prize for fiction – and FT Kola; and Nigerians Segun Afolabi, who won the Caine Prize in 2005, and Elnathan John.

They each win £500.

South African author Zoë Wicomb, who chaired the judging panel, said of The Sack: “From a very strong shortlist we have picked an extraordinary story about the aftermath of revolution with its liberatory promises shattered.

“It makes demands on the reader and challenges conventions of the genre. It yields fresh meaning with every reading. Formally innovative, stylistically stunning, haunting and enigmatic in its effects, The Sack is a truly luminous winner.”

Serpell is an associate professor in the English department of the University of California (Berkeley).