About
MoAD is thrilled to announce that the 2023 African Literary Award finalist is Eloghosa Osunde, author of Vagabonds!. African Book Club discussed Vagabonds! as the book selection for July 2022. Osunde was honored at the virtual Award Ceremony on December 3rd, hosted by African Book Club co-founder Faith Adiele.
Purchase your copy of Vagabonds! at the MoAD Bookstore.
Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer, multidisciplinary maker and world bender. An alumna of the Lambda Literary Workshop (2019), New York Film Academy (2017) and the Caine Prize Workshop (2018), Eloghosa's writing has appeared in multiple publications including Paris Review (where they write a popular surrealist column called 'Melting Clocks'), Granta, Gulf Coast, Georgia Review, Guernica, Lithub, Catapult, Berlin Quarterly and their visual art in Vogue, The New York Times and Paper Magazine. They are a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow and the 2021 prose judge of Fugue Journal's annual writing contest. Profiled by Coveteur for their Class of 2021 issue — alongside other stars such as Issa Rae, Suni Lee and Quil Lemons — Eloghosa has also been featured by Elle, Them, Creative Review and Shondaland to name a few.
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Osunde is the author of Vagabonds!, published in 2022 by Riverhead Books (US), Fourth Estate (UK) and Farafina Books (NG). So far, Vagabonds! — a New York Times' Critics Choice — is a finalist for the Edmund White Prize For Fiction, a finalist for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, a top three finalist for the VCU Capbell Prize, has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction' s First Novel Prize, longlisted for the Nota Bene Prize, is a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick, a Foyles Book Of The Month and a NoName Book Club Pick.
Generous funding for the African Literary Award has been provided by MoAD member, Cedric Brown, a supporter of arts in the diaspora.
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RSVP today for the virtual Award Ceremony on December 3rd. Copies of Vagabonds! are available from the MoAD Bookstore.
About the Authors
Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer, multidisciplinary maker and worldbender .An alumna of the Lambda Literary Workshop (2019), New York Film Academy (2017) and the Caine Prize Workshop (2018), Eloghosa's writing has appeared in multiple publications including Paris Review (where they write a popular surrealist column called 'Melting Clocks'), Granta, Gulf Coast, Georgia Review, Guernica, Lithub, Catapult, Berlin Quarterly and their visual art in Vogue, The New York Times and Paper Magazine. They are a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow and the 2021 prose judge of Fugue Journal's annual writing contest. Profiled by Coveteur for their Class of 2021 issue—alongside other stars such as Issa Rae, Suni Lee and Quil Lemons—Eloghosa has also been featured by Elle, Them, Creative Review and Shondaland to name a few. Osunde is the author of VAGABONDS!, published in 2022 by Riverhead Books (US), FourthEstate (UK) and Farafina Books (NG).
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Cairo. Her work has been published in Granta, LitHub, Poetry, BOMB, The Walrus, The Common, The Offing, and more. In 2017, she won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and in 2019 she won both the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the DISQUIET Fiction Prize. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020. Set in Toronto, this genre-bending work follows an immigrant woman’s romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith. It won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, as well as the Arab American Book Award, and was listed in the Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 by CBC.
Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Naga’s debut novel, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, is a dark romance examining the gaps in North American identity politics, especially when exported overseas. If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
Arinze Ifeakandu is the author of God’s Children Are Little Broken Things. A Dylan Thomas Prize and Republic of Consciousness Prize winner, he is also a finalist for the Kirkus and LAMBDA prizes, and a recipient of the O’Henry Prize and Story Prize Spotlight Award. He was born in Kano, Nigeria.
Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the US in her childhood via Germany. The first Ethiopian-born winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing (2021), her debut short story collection, A DOWN HOME MEAL FOR THESE DIFFICULT TIMES, was published in June 2022 in the US & Canada and in December 2022 in the UK, Commonwealth, EU and beyond. Meron’s short stories have been shortlisted for the 2019 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing and appear in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, Addis Ababa Noir, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, and others. A 2023 San Francisco Public Library Laureate, Meron appeared in San Francisco Magazine’s 2018 feature “Making Waves: 100 Artists Putting the East Bay on the Map” and in Deutsche Welle’s year-end feature “Africa in 2021” for her short stories.