By Iminza Keboge
Published June 3, 2019
Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma of South Africa has beaten A Woman’s Body Is a Country by Nigerian Dami Ajayi and Kingdom of Gravity by Ugandan-born Nicholas Makoha to win the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. The three anthologies were the main contenders for the prize for African poetry.
The prize, that is presented annual by African Poetry Book Fund at Nebraska University-Lincoln, awards US$1000 to a book of poetry by an African writer published in the previous year.
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Koleka Putuma won the award with her 2017-published Collective Amnesia that Bernardine Evaristo, who judged the contest praised for what she described as “a liberated poetic voice that engages with politics, race, religion, relationships, sexuality, feminism, and more. There is also risky formal innovation, emotional and intellectual complexity, biblical intertextuality, and a stirring declamatory audibility.”
While the judge said A Woman’s Body Is a Country “illuminates the slips between memory and desire, family, community, and place”, she celebrated Kingdom of Gravity as an “assured poetic voice that is epic, majestic, timeless.”
A delighted Koleka Putuma, according to Prairie Schooner magazine of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where the African Poetry Book Fund is based, said, “I never imagined that poetry would be part of my life in such a big way,” Putuma said. “I never imagined that it would bring so many amazing moments with it. Winning the Luschei Prize is definitely right up there with the best moments.”
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Patuma has been called “one of the young pioneers who took South Africa by storm” by the Sunday Times, “one of twelve future shapers” by Marie Claire SA, “the groundbreaking new voice of South African poetry” by OkayAfrica, and “one of one hundred young people disrupting the status-quo in South Africa” by independent media.
Collective Amnesia was named 2017 book of the year by the City Press and one of the best books of 2017 by the Sunday Times and Quartz Africa. It has been translated into Spanish and released in Madrid by Flores Rara. A German translation is forthcoming from Wunderhorn Publishing House later in 2019, and a Danish translation will be published by Rebel with a Cause in Denmark in 2020.
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