FRANCES OGAMBA WINS KALAHARI SHORT STORY COMPETITION

by | Dec 2, 2020 | Gist Corner



Frances Ogamba’s unpublished story, “My Husband’s Wife”, is the winning story for the inaugural Kalahari Short Story Competition.
To celebrate its official launch, Collection Kalahari organized a short story competition open to all writers using Swahili, French or English language. In each language category, three stories were selected, which will be published by Kalahari Collection. There writers served as judges for the English language category: May-Lan Tan (author of the short story collection Things to Make and Break), Caoilinn Hughes (author of the novel Orchid & the Wasp), and Elnathan John (author of the novel Born on Tuesday).
The three best stories selected by the judges: The Machine by Muhumuza Charles (Kampala, Uganda) which takes third place. A Mother’s Face is An Atlas That Leads You Home by Howard M-B Maximus (Buea, Cameroon) which takes second place, and “My Husband’s Wife” by Frances Ogamba (Port Harcourt, Nigeria) which is the overall winning story.
Mary-Lan Tan describes Frances’ story as “a quietly devastating work that realizes its ambitions with impeccable grace while feeling completely organic.” Caoilinn Hughes sees it as “a timeless, deeply compelling story, teeming with perfectly observed details.” And Elnathan John: “The story, simple but by no means simplistic, takes us on an intimate journey of loss and love and the heaviness of betrayal.”
Frances when contacted yesterday about the announcement of her story as the winning story, expressed her feelings in one word: overwhelming.
Frances Ogamba is an alumna of Chimamanda’s Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop. She is a joint winner for the 2019 SyncityNg Anniversary Anthology, shortlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize, longlisted for the 2019 OWT Shorts Story Prize, the K&L Prize for African Literature, and the winner of the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction for her story The Valley of Memories published here on Afreecan Read. A date has not been announced for the publication of My Husband’s Wife.

Congratulations to Frances.