Mubanga Kalimamukwento has been announced as the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner.
Kalimamukwento is an award-winning storyteller, essayist and lawyer. She is the first Zambian to win the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She is also the first Zambian to win the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award with her first novel, The Mourning Bird. Kalimamukwento has also won other awards and has been featured in literary spaces across the globe.
The Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which was founded in 1983, is usually open to writers who have:
- published a novel or a book-length collection of fiction with a reputable book publisher, or
- a minimum of three short stories or novellas in magazines or journals of national distribution.
Winners are awarded a cash prize of $15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Additionally, they recieve support in the nation-wide promotion of their book.
Kalimamukwento’s collection of short stories, “Obligations to the Wounded,” selected by Angie Cruz, with be published on October 8th, 2024.
“These thematically linked stories deliver an intricate study of Zambian women living in both Zambia and abroad who are weighing their options of who to love, where to live, where to work,” stated Cruz who is the author of How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water. “The author, with a poet’s restraint, has written stories that deftly negotiate the challenges and tribulations women face when they feel the pressure and duty to yield to the will of family, community, customs, country, and spiritual beliefs. Obligations to the Wounded graceful, touching and generous collection.”
Obligations to the Wounded is said to employ the use of proverbs and short stories specifically rooted in Zambian heritage. From languages, to culture, and place, examining the cost of womanhood through the voices of twelve Zambian women and girls. The stories converse with global social problems through games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore. Finally, it illustrates women’s burdens through the lens of religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence and racial discrimination.
Kalimamukwento shared how much winning meant to her. “This is a prize I have been reading and entering for years, so a win is a kind of ‘Finally’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’ moment for me.”
Manuscript submissions to the Prize are judged anonymously by nationally known writers.
Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento will be published in hardcover by the University of Pittsburgh Press with an on-sale date of October 8, 2024. You can connect with Kalimamukwento on her X (FKA Twitter) Page.