By Ayo Onikoyi

The Best Okereke Prize For Short Fiction have unveiled judges for its inaugural year, while also calling for submission of entries from October 1st, 2023 to December 31st, 2023.

The judges, as announced by the prize are Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Toby Nwoke and Chideraa Ike-Akaenyi. The judges were selected on account of their reputation, integrity and commitment to the art of writing and literature.

Explaining the modalities and eligibility for the prize, the team stated that the writer must be resident in Nigeria and that the submitted short story must be previously unpublished on any platform, both digital and hardcopy.

“Submissions will only be accepted via our email and only one short story per writer will be considered for the prize. The works must be fictional and between 2,500 to 5,000 words long. The body of the mail should include a cover note specifying the author’s name, date of birth, email address and telephone number. The story should be formatted, using Times New Roman with font size of 12, double spaced and submitted as a Word Document.

“No form of identification should appear on the submitted Word document. Any identifying information on the submitted document attracts automatic disqualification.The winner of the prize in its inaugural year gets a cash reward of #200,000, while two honorable mentions selected from the shortlist of five will receive the sum of #50,000 each. Entries that promote misogyny, homophobia, ableism and any other forms of hate speech will not be considered for the prize. The prize reserves the right to edit and publish the winning stories on its website, or in an annual anthology,” they said.

“A longlist of ten stories will be released in February, 2024. A shortlist of five stories will be released in March, 2024, followed by the announcement of the winner in March, 2024,” the prize specified.

Short profile of the judges:

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (@ChinuaEzenwa) lives in Lincoln, NE where he is pursuing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a focus on Creative Writing (poetry). A MacPhee fellow, 2022- 2023. He became a runner-up in Etisalat Prize for Literature, Flash Fiction, 2014. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem, 2018 and the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize (EOPP 2018).

He was the recipient of the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 Writing Award, and also the recipient of the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 scholarship to the MFA Program. In 2019, he was the winner of the Sevhage/Angus Poetry Prize and second runner-up in the 5th Singapore Poetry Contest. He was shortlisted for the Alpine poetry fellowship, 2023.

His works have appeared in Isele Magazine, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Massachusetts Review, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, The Common, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Notra Dame, Anmly, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Spectacle Magazine, Ruminate and elsewhere.

Toby Nwoke is a screenwriter based in Lagos. A fresh voice; he writes from a vantage point where he melds his own unique art with the resonant techniques of the older generation of Nigerian writers who were made in Nsukka: the Achebes, the Adichies, the Okigbos. He led the Okike Literary Society for 3 years before handing it over in 2016.

Chideraa Ike-Akaenyi is an Igbo writer. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Agbowo, Itanile, Ngiga Review and Kreative Diadem. She holds a degree in Literature and was a finalist for the 2021 Awele Creative Trust Prize for Fiction. She’s currently one of the eight young Nigerian writers selected as participants of the EIO workshop, 2023.