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As a new week begins, we hope that you have a great week...even as you read these interesting posts online. Enjoy!


Olufemi Terry's Caine Prize Winning Story, "Stickfighting Days"

"Thwack, Thwack, the two of them go at it like madmen, but the boys around them barely stir

with excitement. They both use one stick and we find this swordy kind of stickfighting a bitcrappy. Much better two on one or two on two – lots more skill involved and more likelihood ofblood.

I turn to Lapy. “Let’s go off and practise somewhere. This is weak.” Lapy likes any stickfight, but almost always does what I say. "

Ben Okri Interview in the Guardian UK

"I'd be walking along and suddenly I'd be unable to stand straight and I'd hold on to a lamppost and find the lamppost wasn't solid either. That was a turning point for me. It began a great journey. I don't feel I need to lean on lampposts any more. You need internal lampposts – and a few good friends."

Articles on The Pilgrimages website. Here's an excerpt from Uzodinma Iweala's post!

"I’ve been telling everybody that I’m going to Timbuktu, “No really Timbuktu.”

“Is that even a real place?” I’ve been asked a bunch of times. Wikipedia says its real and full of at least 30,000 people, accessible by road, boat and flight, full of many wonders, so it must be true. How embarrassing it is, how exciting it is to be on the verge of a place that you as recently as two months ago really knew nothing about except for the fact it exists and that a backpack company headquartered in New York makes bags with same name

I should know more. Really and truly I should know more. I should have logged my hours in the library researching, pulling books and scholarly articles, looking at pictures, reading the myriad travel narratives already written about Timbuktu. Sadly I haven’t had the time to do so. Medical school has this way of getting in the way of the really important things."

Nnedi Okorafor's story in Clarkesworld Magazine :

"They will never die. No information dies once gathered, once collected.

The creatures' field guide is thorough but incomplete.

I am the greatest explorer.

I am griot and I will soon join the others.

The Newest Issue of Open Wide Magazine. 

The Latest issue of ITCH.

The sixth issue of ITCH online is live, and full of fascinating insights into almost 70 private mental worlds, organised around a rather self-centred theme:

i

What is i? Is it you or me? Is it imagination or information? Is it intellect or introspection?

As always, ITCH is crammed full of poetry, short stories, book reviews, experimental writing, photo essays, videos and miscellaneous visual splendour for your reading and viewing pleasure.

Explore!

Olufemi Terry Wins 2010 Caine Prize

Sierra Leone's Olufemi Terry has won the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa's leading literary award, for 'Stickfighting Days' from Chimurenga vol 12/13, Cape Town. The Chair of Judges, The Economist's Literary Editor Fiammetta Rocco, announced Olufemi as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday 5 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Fiammetta Rocco said "ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative, Olufemi Terry's 'Stickfighting Days' presents a heroic culture that is Homeric in its scale and conception. The execution of this story is so tight and the presentation so cinematic, it confirms Olufemi Terry as a talent with an enormous future."

Born in Sierra Leone to a Sierra Leonean father and an Antillean mother, Terry grew up in Nigeria, the UK and Cote d'Ivoire, studied at the New York University (earning a B.A. in Political Science in 1994 and a Masters degree in Interactive Telecommunications in 2002) and has lived in Kenya, Somalia and Uganda, working as a journalist and editor with The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the World Health Organisation, and the World Bank. In 2008 he earned an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. He now lives in Cape Town and is completing work on his first novel.

With this win, Terry joins a distinguished list of Caine laureates, including Nigerians EC Osondu (2009), Segun Afolabi (2005), Helon Habila (2001), Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina (2001) and Ugandan Monica arac de Nyeko (2007). Apart from the cash prize, the win also comes with a month-long writing residency at Georgetown University.

The Caine Prize, established in 2000, celebrates short stories of between 3,000 and 10,000 words by African writers, and is one of the continent's most prestigious literary awards. Its patrons are the three African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as Chinua Achebe.