By Iminza Keboge
Published May 10, 2020
Rabha Ashry of Egypt has won the 2020 Brunel International African Poetry Prize.
Ashry will receive a £3,000 honorarium while her winning selection of poems is now up on africanpoetryprize.org/, the Brunel University website.
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A New York University Abu Dhabi graduate, Ashry has just completed Master of Fine Arts (MFA) studies in Writing at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. She writes about exile, the diaspora, and living between languages.
Other poets who had been shortlisted for the prize that was founded in 2012 and the awarded for the first time in 2013, included Akosua Afiriyie-Hwedie (Zambia/Ghana/Botswana), Inua Ellams (Nigeria), Amanda Holiday (Sierra Leone), Nour Kamel (Egypt), and Saradha Soobrayen (Mauritius).
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The judges, who comprised Karen McCarthy Woolf (Chair), Kayo Chingonyi, Billy Kahora, Momtaza Mehri and Koleka Putuma, praised Ashry’s poetry for ‘reminding us of what can be at stake in a poem. Each twist of phrase and line is weighed carefully achieving a fruitful balance between harmony and dissonance, the mundane and the haunting, the ordinary and extraordinary. She deftly interweaves a range of powerful, and sometimes jarring, images. It feels as if the collection is performing a kind of undoing and unmasking. The poet’s voice subverts the safety of language and imagery, and has you feeling displaced and desperate to be belong – to root, in all the ways that are uncomfortable, challenging and necessary. Deceptively simple, these are poems which echo long after they finish on the page’.
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This Bernardine Evaristo-founded award is said to be the largest cash prize for African poetry in the world. Aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa, the Prize is sponsored by Brunel University London and is open to African poets worldwide who have not yet published a full poetry collection. Each poet has to submit 10 poems in order to be eligible.
Past winners include Warsan Shire (2013); Liyou Libsekal (2014); Safia Elhillo and Nick Makoha (2015); Gbenga Adesina and Chekwube O Danladi (2016); Romeo Oriogun (2017); Hiwot Adilow, Theresa Lola and Momtaza Mehri (2018); and Nadra Mabrouk and Jamila Osman (2019).
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