At £30,000, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award is the richest prize for a single short story in the English language and is open to any novelist or short story writer from around the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland.

Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell has been longlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.

Serpell, whose acclaimed debut novel The Old Drift was most recently awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction at the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was longlisted for her short story “Take It.”

Apparently, the story was initially “pulled from a publication because it did not strike the right ‘liberal’ tone.” But it was eventually published by Freeman Reads. Serpell revealed this in a tweet sharing the news of the longlist.

She is the second African writer to be nominated for the award following Petina Gappah’s shortlisting in 2016.

The 2020 prize is sponsored by audiobook publisher Audible

A shortlist of six would be announced in June 2020 and the winner in July.

We are rooting for Namwali Serpell.