JUDGES

 ’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

Her novel manuscript won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and she is a 2021 fiction fellow with the Miami Book Fair. pemiaguda.com

Masande Ntshanga is the author of the novels, The Reactive (2014) and Triangulum (2019), as well as the chapbook, Native Life in the Third Millennium (2020), an experimental collection of poetry and prose. He is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013 and a Betty Trask Award in 2018. He was born in East London, South Africa, and graduated from the University of Cape Town, where he completed his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He has received a Fulbright Award, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in Chimurenga, The LA Review of Books Quarterly Journal, MIT Technology Review and n+1.

Natasha is a Zambian who lives in Lusaka. She is also of Nigerian and Jamaican heritage. Her short stories have been featured in various pan-African publications, including ‘Short Story Day Africa 2018’ for Door of No Return, which has been translated into Portuguese for Brazilian Journal Periferias. 

Her first book No Be From Hia was selected as a Graywolf Africa Press finalist in 2019. After initial success in Zambia, it was acquired by South African publisher Black Bird Books. In 2020, she participated in the inaugural online festival Afro Lit Sans Frontieres in which she interviewed authors such as Leila Aboulela, Ayobami Adebayo and Tsitsi Dangarembga. She is an alumna of Curtis Brown Creative’s inaugural Breakthrough Course for Black Writers.