Siphokazi Jonas’ Weeping Becomes a River Wins the 2025 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry
South African poet Siphokazi Jonas is the winner of the African Poetry Book Fund’s 2025 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, for her collection Weeping Becomes a River. This debut collection was also awarded The 2024 Book Lounge Book of the Year, is the joint winner of the 2025 HSS Award for Best Poetry, and is listed among the 100 Notable African Books of 2024.
Siphokazi Jonas is a multi-award-winning poet, playwright, actor, and producer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds an MA in English Literature and an undergraduate degree in Drama and English from the University of Cape Town. She has been a featured act at numerous festivals globally. Her awards include a South African Film and Television Award for Best Short Film, Western Cape Cultural Affairs Awards for Most Innovative Young Artist in 2022 and for Literary Excellence in 2025, and 100 Sunday World Unsung Heroes. Siphokazi was also awarded the 2025 University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for South African writing in English, and she was named the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees 2025 Festival Poet alongside Antjie Krog.
Author Dr. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers judged this year’s prize, which annually awards $1,000 to a book of poetry by an African writer published in the previous year.
Of the collection, Dr. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers wrote:
“Emerging from a rich lyrical expression, the collection provides extensive formal variations, its multiplicity of voices in energetic dialogue with traditional isiXhosa intsomi to contemporary radio plays, as well as Shakespeare, the bible and the vast global reserves of lyric poetry […]
This poet expands the notion of the traditional storyteller by adding to the locales of the village and the river, the intertextual space of Prospero’s Island where she rewrites the missionary, the schooling system and the nation-state with a vibrancy that destabilizes narratives of violence that turned Africa abject.
Weeping becomes a river is a work of intense sensory experience, of reverence for language, for spirit and ultimately, for self. It is all of these things without solipsism or sentimentality. It is a deeply moving work that inspires curiosity and respect.”
The Luschei Prize for African Poetry, which was initially funded by late literary philanthropist and poet Glenna Luschei, is the only pan-African book prize of its kind. The Glenna Luschei Prize promotes African poetry written in English or in translation by recognizing a significant book published each year by an African poet.
Jonas is the eleventh poet to win the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, following Momtaza Mehri in 2024 for Bad Diaspora Poems, Tawanda Mulalu in 2023 for Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die: Poems, Togara Muzanenhamo in 2022 for Virga, Leila Chatti in 2021 for Deluge, and Maneo Refiloe Mohale in 2020 for Everything is a Deathly Flower.
The 2026 Luschei Prize for African Poetry is now open to submissions of books by African poets published during 2025 and will be judged by Gabeba Baderoon. To learn more about the prize and how to submit, visit our Contests page.
The African Poetry Book Fund is led by Kwame Dawes, Professor of Literary Arts, and housed at Brown University.