Stone Canoe congratulates
E.C. Osondu
 |
Stone Canoe congratulates
E.C. Osondu
upon the occasion of his winning the 2009 Caine Prize for African Literature. Osondu, originally from Nigeria, was a fellow in the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program, and won Stone Canoe’s first Allen and Nirelle Galson award for fiction in 2007. He currently teaches at Providence University. The Caine Prize, established in 2000 by Sir Michael Caine, is Africa’s leading literary prize. The winner is awarded 10,000 pounds at an annual July ceremony at the Bodleain Library in Oxford, and also is offered a residency at Georgetown University . Osondu won the prize for his story “Waiting,” originally published in Guernica Magazine. Guernica fiction editor Meakin Armstrong calls it “a well-told story about a kind of life most of us couldn’t even begin to imagine.” Chair of the Caine judges, the New Statesman’s Nana Yaa Mensah, called the story “a tour de force describing, form a child’s point of view, the dislocating experience of being a displaced person. It is powerfully written with not an ounce of fat on it—and deeply moving.” Harper Collins will publish Osondu's new book of stories in 2010. |
