The theme for the 2018 Short Story Day Africa Prize has been announced!

This year’s theme is Hotel Africa, and the deadline is 31 August 2018. Read the submissions guidelines carefully!

First prize is $800, second prize $200 and third prize $100.

Check-in …
To five-star neon-lit luxury. To budget motels with the option to pay by the hour. To intimate anonymous rooms wiped clean every twenty-four hours or clammy beds where remnants of yesterday’s guests still lurk.

Check-in…
Lovers, aid workers, businessmen local and foreign, wedding guests, gap-year travellers, volunteer tourists, honeymooners, UN soldiers, politicians, adventure seekers, evangelists, holidaymakers, warmongers, peacekeepers.

Check-in…
To hotels made of brick and cement and blood and sweat. Hotels made of corrugated iron and clay and hope and faith. Hotels celebrated, hotels forgotten. Hotels that have served as shelter for the night or refuge when the shots rang out.

Check-in to Hotel Africa
In 2018, Short Story Day Africa is seeking innovative short fiction set in the rooms, the passages, the bars and the lobbies of hotels across the continent, as well as metafiction exploring Africa as a hotel herself. If these walls could talk, what story would they tell?

• Read the submission guidelines and terms and conditions of entry here

Previous winners of the Short Story Day Africa Prize

• 2016: Sibongile Fisher is a published poet and writer from Johannesburg, South Africa.
• 2015: Cat Hellisen is a South African-born writer of fantasy for adults and children. Her work includes the novel When the Sea is Rising Red and short stories in Apex, F & SF, Shimmer Magazine, and Tor.com. Her latest novel is a fairy tale for the loveless, Beastkeeper.
• 2014: Diane Awerbuck is a South African novelist. Her novel, Gardening at Night, won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best First Book (Africa and the Caribbean), and was shortlisted for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. In 2011, her collection of short stories, Cabin Fever, was published by Random House Struik, who also published her second novel, Home Remedies, the year after. She was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2014, the same year that she won the Short Story Day Africa Prize.
• 2013: Okwiri Oduor was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Her novella, The Dream Chasers, was highly commended in the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, while her story “My Father’s Head” – first published by Short Story Day Africa in Feast, Famine & Potluck – won her the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing, making her the third Kenyan winner of the prize after Binyavanga Wainaina in 2002 and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor in 2003. Oduor is a 2014 MacDowell Colony fellow.

Categories Africa Fiction South Africa

Tags Awards Short Stories Short Story Day Africa Prize Writing