Arinze Ifeakandu, Nigerian writer and Caine prize finalist, has been crowned winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for his debut: God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, published by A Public Space Books.
A collection of nine, distinct, exhilarating short stories, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things charts a harrowing, realistic picture of what it is to live and love as a queer man in contemporary Nigeria. While Eloghosa Osunde, author of Vagabonds!, praises Arinze’s writing as a “lush tenderness”, Colm Tóibín remarks of the book as “brilliant” and “intimate”. He marks Arinze as a “serious literary talent”.
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things has also been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It is a 2023 finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and Lambda Literary Awards.
Born and raised in Kano, Nigeria, Arinze Ifeakandu now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he studies at Florida State University. He is an AKO Caine Prize for African Writing finalist, A Public Space Writing Fellow, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from A Public Space, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, One Story, Redemption Song and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2018.
The prize money, $35,000, is distributed between authors and presses, and shared across the shortlist.
The award is in its first year and honours work published by a small press.
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things is Arinze Ifeakandu’s first book.
Congratulations to him!
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