The Caine Prize for African Writing 2019

Cherrie Kandie is a Kenyan writer whose first published short story ‘Sew My Mouth’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing. She is thinking very hard about writing a novel about little girls and big houses.

Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria and numerous other countries where her father was stationed for work. She has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award and the Caine Prize, and a winner of the African Commonwealth Short Story Prize and an O. Henry Award, and other honors. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GRANTA and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, and MacDowell, among others. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the 2017 Kirkus Prize and the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Minneapolis and is working on a novel.

Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American born in Addis Ababa who came to the U.S. as a refugee in her childhood via East and West Germany. Her stories appear in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, and others. Her writing is also in The New York Times Book Review and the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School (Washington State Bar), and a BA from Princeton in history. Meron is a recipient of a 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellowship.

Ngwah-Mbo Nana Nkweti is a Cameroonian-American writer whose work has been featured in numerous magazines, journals, and online publications. Nkweti is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, and Clarion West as well as a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—where selections from her debut collection were awarded a Plughaupt Prize for Excellence in Fiction. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at Hub City.