Meet the Judges

Megan Ross

Megan Ross was born in Johannesburg in 1989. She is a writer, poet and graphic designer, and has received critical acclaim for both her short fiction and poetry. Megan is the 2017 recipient of the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction, one of the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Award winners, as well as an Iceland Writers Retreat Alumnus. Her first book, a collection of poems called Milk Fever, was published by uHlanga in 2018. She lives on the Wild Coast with her partner and son.

Gloria Mwaniga Minage

Gloria Mwaniga Minage is a Kenyan writer, editor and high school teacher who writes literary articles for the Saturday Nation and The East African newspapers.

She has authored five children’s books with Longhorn Publishers and Moran Publishers, Kenya.

Gloria is a 2017 Ebedi International Residency Fellow and a Summer Literary Seminar (SLS) Nairobi Workshop Attendee. She has been shortlisted for the Writivism Short Story Competition and the Morland Writing Scholarship. Gloria also served as national coordinator of AMKA space for women writers and as 2018/2019 judge of the monthly flash fiction competition, 100WordsAfrica.

Gloria’s work has appeared in the Johannesburg Review of Books, Ebedi Review, Munyori Literary Journal, Praxis Magazine, Fresh Paint Anthology and Sundown Anthology.

Gloria is represented by Storm Literary Agency and is currently working on a young adult novel.

Kelechi njoku

Kelechi Njoku’s writings have appeared on adda, Litro, Brittle Paper, and This Is Africa. He was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and previously won the Writivism Short Story Prize, West Africa Region.

In the last six years, he has worked with several organisations devoted to developing literature and learning on the continent—the Ake Arts and Book Festival (2014), Peripheral Vision International (2015), the inaugural Dusty Manuscript Prize Nigeria (2018), and the Writivism Short Story Prize (2016 and 2017). His work has been spotlighted by The Book Banque (“9 Stories You Should Read”) and Brittle Paper (“79 notable pieces of 2017”). An alumnus of the prestigious Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, taught by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, he will be a writer-in-residence at Black Rock, Senegal, in 2020. He lives in Lagos, where he is senior editor at Kachifo, and editor at Bakwa Magazine.