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The 2025 Evaristo Prize Short List!

APBF Staff May 15, 2025

The African Poetry Book Fund is thrilled to announce the short-list of the Evaristo Prize for African Poetry (formerly the Brunel International Prize for African Poetry).

The judging panel (Tjawangwa Dema (Chair), Tsitsi Jaji, and Mahtem Shiferraw) had much praise for the submissions the African Poetry Book Fund received during the reading period. They note that “one can begin to discern the emergence of clear strands of distinctive formal and thematic innovation and one can begin to describe a contemporary African Anglophone poetics…. As we see it, there is no, nor should there be, a formula for a prize-winning poem, or at least none that we sought from the outset. Instead, the poems revealed themselves reading by reading. With each poem inviting us to assess it against its own artistic ambition.”

The judging panel announces the following shortlist for the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poets: 

Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother? – Jeremy Karn (Liberia) 

All Those Losses – Prosper Ifeanyi (Nigeria) 

A Dying Man’s Wish and other poems – Akumbu Uche (Nigeria)

Song  – Ameen Animashaun (Nigeria) 

On Memory and Forgetting  – Chiwenite Onyekwelu (Nigeria) 

The Evaristo Prize for African Poetry is an annual prize of USD $1,500 awarded to ten poems written by an African poet. Established first as the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (BIAPP) in 2012 by British writer Bernardine Evaristo, who founded and managed the prize for ten years, the Evaristo Prize was renamed and has been administered by the African Poetry Book Fund since 2022.

President of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature and a celebrated writer, Bernardine Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, essays, drama, criticism, and journalism.

The African Poetry Book Fund looks forward to announcing the award winner in May 2025.

Prizes

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