Poetavango Award for Short Fiction (PASF) Announces Winners

 The Poetavango Award for Short Fiction results were announced on our Facebook page on December 30^th 2019. The winners for the 2019/2020 award are as follows;

1^st Place: Kearoma Mosata for her story ‘When a Woman Bends’. She wins this year’s trophy and P3000.

2^nd Place Runner Up: Wame Molefhe for her story ‘Dawn Came Early to Gaborone’. Wame walks away with P2000.

3^rd Place Runner Up: Olorato Jessica Jackson for her story ‘What He Doesn’t Know’. For her prize, she gets P1000.

Congratulation to Kearoma, Wame, and Olorato. The dates for the award ceremony will be announced soon.

The shortlist included stories by Nkululeko Diteko and Benita Magopane.

The Poetavango Award for Short Fiction (PASF) is an annual literary contest organised and run by the Poetavango Collective in Maun, Botswana. The Prize focuses on the short story form. PASF is part of the Maun International Arts Festival (MIAF), though the award ceremony is held outside of the Festival. The 2019 MIAF was sponsored by, among others, The Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development, and the U.S. Embassy Botswana.

The contest hopes to support and encourage writers of any nationality living in Botswana, both emerging and established.

For the 2019/2020 contest, which is the fourth installment of the Prize, there was a relatively small number of submissions in comparison to the previous years. 

Who were the 2019/2020 Judges?

Tendai Huchu

Tendai Huchu is a Zimbabwean author, best known for his novels The Hairdresser of Harare (2010) and The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2014). His first novel, The Hairdresser of Harare, was released in 2010 to critical acclaim and has been translated into German, French, Italian and Spanish. His short fiction in multiple genres and nonfiction have appeared in Enkare review, The Manchester Review, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Gutter, Interzone, AfroSF, Wasafiri, Warscapes, The Africa Report and elsewhere. In 2013 he received a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Sacatar Fellowship. He was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize.

Ukamaka Olisakwe, Nigeria.

Ukamaka Olisakwe grew up in Kano, Nigeria, and now lives in Vermont. In 2014, she was named one of the continent’s most promising writers under the age of 40 by the UNESCO World Book Capital for the Africa39 project. In 2016, she was awarded an honorary fellowship in Writing from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. And in 2018, she won the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ Emerging Writer Scholarship for the MFA in Writing and Publishing program.

Ukamaka, a finalist for the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship, has had her works appear in the New York Times, Longreads, The Rumpus, Catapult, Rattle, Waxwing, Jalada, Brittle Paper, Hunger Moutain, Sampsonia Way, and more.

Alice S. Yousef

Alice S. Yousef is a Palestinian translator, blogger, and emerging poet, who has published short stories and translations. Her work can be found on web-magazines including Twopoetswrite and VisualVerse. She holds a Masters in Writing from Warwick University and is a fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She tweets @Aliceyousef.