Nigeria's Rotimi Babatunde has won the 13th Caine Prize for African Writing 2012. This is Africa’s leading literary award. He received a £10,000 prize for his story Bombay's Republic, which is about Nigerian soldiers who fought in the Burma campaign during World War II.
The Chair of Judges Bernardine Evaristo MBE, announced Rotimi Babatunde as the winner of the prize at a dinner held Monday, 2 July at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Bernardine Evaristo said: “Bombay's Republic vividly describes the story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma campaign of World War Two. It is ambitious, darkly humorous and in soaring, scorching prose exposes the exploitative nature of the colonial project and the psychology of Independence.”
Mr. Babatunde, who currently lives in Ibadan in Nigeria, will now be given the opportunity to go to Georgetown University in the US, as a writer-in-residence for a month at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment