The Short Story Is Dead, Long Live the Short Story! Announces Longlist

September 04, 2017

The longlist for The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story! has been announced. The prize is organised by Black Letter Media, a full service print and digital publishing and bookselling company with “focus on publishing new storytellers who have a unique, powerful and alternative vision of Africa.”

The winning short story will receive R5 000, while the first and second runner-up stories will receive R1 500 and R500 respectively. All the longlisted stories will appear in The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story (Vol. 3), to be launched in late 2017.

Here is the press release.

True to the momentous event that inspired this year’s theme for our annual short story competition, The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story!, the longlisted stories address questions of social injustice, death, human rights, love and freedom, rendering an alternative vision of the future in ways that channel our past. Themed “The people shall…”, a phrase borrowed from the Freedom Charter, the third installment of our short story competition provides an essential outlet for new and emerging writers from Africa and the Diaspora looking to tell the continent’s stories in innovative forms.

We received over 100 stories from all over the continent and beyond, triple our call for submissions for volume 2 of the same competition—we are thrilled to see this growing interest in The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story anthology.

Here are the longlisted writers.