News flash: From now on submissions for the Gerald Kraak Prize will be kept open all year round. Selections for the 2019 anthology will be made by the end of February 2019 – but new submissions are welcome at any time.

The Jacana Literary Foundation (JLF) and the Other Foundation are pleased to announce that submissions for the third annual Gerald Kraak Prize and Anthology for 2019 are now open.

Created in honour of the late activist Gerald Kraak’s extraordinary legacy of supporting human rights, this prize advances his contribution to building a world that is safe and welcoming to all.

This unique prize calls for multi-layered, brave and stirring African voices that represent a new wave of fresh storytelling, one that provokes thought on the topics of gender, social justice and sexuality.

• Fiction
• Non-fiction
• Poetry
• Photography – now extended to include all visual arts with the exception of video and electronic
• Journalism/magazine reporting
• Scholarly articles in academic journals and book chapters/extracts
• Social media/blog writings and contributions

Only the very best work submitted will be shortlisted and published in the anthology, with the winners announced in 2019 at a ceremony hosted by the Other Foundation.

A cash prize of R25 000 will be awarded to the author of the winning piece. The JLF will try to partner with publishers throughout the African continent in order to disseminate the work as widely as possible.

Gerald Kraak (1956–2014) was a passionate champion of social justice, an anti-apartheid activist and the head of the Atlantic Philanthropies’ Reconciliation and Human Rights Programme in South Africa. He authored two books, including the European Union Literary Award-winning Ice in the Lungs (Jacana, 2005), which explores South African politics, and directed a documentary on gay conscripts in the apartheid army. He will be remembered for being kind and generous, delightfully irreverent and deeply committed to realising an equal and just society for all. His unfinished novel, Shadow Play, posthumously completed by Alison Lowry, was published by Jacana Media in May 2017.

Gerald Kraak Prize judges

Sisonke Msimang is a writer and columnist with the Daily Maverick in South Africa. She has held fellowships at Yale University, the Aspen Institute and Wits University in Johannesburg. She was born in Swaziland to parents who were political exiles and raised in Zambia, Kenya and Canada, before going to the United States as an undergraduate. Her family returned to South Africa after the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of liberation movements in the early 1990s. She currently lives on planes, navigating the distance between South Africa and Australia. She is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home and the recently published The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela.

Sylvia Tamale is a Ugandan academic and human rights activist in Uganda. She was the first female dean in the Law Faculty at Makerere University, Uganda. In 2011 she published the book African Sexualities: A Reader. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, women in politics and feminist jurisprudence. Tamale has published extensively in these and other areas and has served as a visiting professor at several academic institutions globally and on a number of international human rights boards. Tamale holds an LLB from Makerere University, an LLM from Harvard Law School and a PhD in sociology and feminist studies from the University of Minnesota.

Mark Gevisser graduated from Yale University in 1987 with a BA magna cum laude. His books include Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (1994), which he edited with Edwin Cameron; Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa (1996), a collection of his celebrated profiles from the Mail & Guardian; Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, which won the 2008 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction; and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (2012), which was shortlisted for both the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award and the Jan Michalski Prize for World Literature. He wrote and produced a feature-length documentary film, The Man Who Drove With Mandela (1998), which won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, and he has been shortlisted for an International Emmy for one of his scripts for the crime series, Zero Tolerance (2004). His journalism has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times and The Guardian and Granta to most South African newspapers.

Otosirieze Obi-Young is a writer, editor and literary journalist. He is deputy editor of the African literary culture website Brittle Paper. He is an editor at 14, Nigeria’s first queer art collective, which has published two volumes, We Are Flowers and The Inward Gaze. He is the curator of the Art Naija Series, a sequence of themed e-anthologies of writing and visual art exploring different aspects of Nigerianness, including Enter Naija: The Book of Places and Work Naija: The Book of Vocations. His fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review and Transition, and has been shortlisted for the inaugural Gerald Kraak Award and for the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. He attended the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and taught English at Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu. He has completed a collection of short stories, You Sing of a Longing, and is represented by David Godwin Associates literary agency. He can be found at Otosirieze.com.

Enquiries can be directed to awards@jacana.co.za.

Please fill in the online entry form to be considered for this award: http://jacana.co.za/awards/gerald-kraak-award-and-anthology.

Categories Africa Fiction Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Awards Gerald Kraak Gerald Kraak Award Gerald Kraak Prize Jacana Literary Foundation Jacana Media Mark Gevisser News Otosirieze Obi-Young Sisonke Msimang Sylvia Tamale