Hey Brittle Paper readers! We’re excited to announce the 2020 Brittle Paper‘s Persons of the Year awards.

We began the Brittle Paper African Literary Person of the Year awards in 2015 to celebrate a literary personality who elevates African literary culture in outstanding ways. But over the years, the award has become a way to recognize individuals who work behind the scenes to hold up the African literary establishment in the given year. Authors have lots of prizes and awards, but what about the people behind the scenes running festivals, creating platforms, selling books, publishing books? These are the people we want to celebrate — those doing all the infrastructural heavy lifting to make African literature thrive.

We typically announce one Person of the Year. But this year, with African literature culture growing so fast, we are adding on other categories. So, in addition to our annual African Literary Person of the Year Award, the categories for the 2020 Brittle Paper Persons of the Year Awards are:

  1. Digital Literary Platform of the Year
  2. Publishing House of the Year
  3. Writer-Activist of the Year
  4. Social Media Influencer of the Year
  5. Academic of the Year

We invite you to send in nominations for individuals or platforms for the above categories. There are two ways do so:

A. Share your nomination on social media.

  1. Tag us @brittlepaper with the name of the individual or platform AND the category for consideration.
  2. Use the hashtag #BPPersonOfTheYearAward.
  3. For Twitter, you may create a new tweet OR reply to our Brittle Paper Persons of the Year Awards tweets on our feed. Either way, be sure to include the above information.
  4. For Facebook and Instagram, you may create a new post OR reply to our Brittle Paper Persons of the Year Awards posts on our feed. Either way, be sure to include the above information.

B. Send an email to [email protected] with the title “BP Person of the Year 2020 Nomination.” The email is to contain only the following:

  1. Category for consideration
  2. Name of the individual or platform
  3. (optional) Brief reason for nomination not to exceed 100 words

You may submit only one nomination per category. You may, however, submit nominations for more than category (e.g., nominations for Publishing House and Social Media Influencer) within a single social media Tweet/post or email.

The nomination period closes November 13. Awardees will be announced in December.

Share with us who you think should be nominated for an award and help us spread the word! We look forward to receiving your nominations.