Zimbabwe author wins African Caine prize

A Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo has won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing, which is regarded as the biggest literary award on the continent.

She was rewarded for her Hitting Budapest short story that tells of six children from a shanty town in Zimbabwe who are driven by poverty to steal guavas from an up market suburb.

Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo and recently completed a masters’ degree at Cornell University in America where she is now teaching.

She received 10 000 pounds in prize money and will be given an opportunity to take up a month’s residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC as a writer in residence.

At a prize giving ceremony in the UK’s city of Oxford Judge chair Hisham Matar said: “The language of Hitting Budapest crackles.”

“This is a story with a moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NonViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language,” Matar said.

Bulawayo told a London based Zimbabwean radio station that her story was linked to the situation in her home country through the interrogation of the issue of poverty.