The UK’s Royal Society of Literature has announced the longlist for the 2025 Ondaatje Prize. Selected by judges Ruth Gilligan (Chair), Charlie Craggs and Roy McFarlane, the total list of fifteen titles includes four by African authors!
The Ondaatje Prize offers an annual award of £10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place. The shortlist will be revealed on Monday, April 28 and the winner will be announced at a special event in mid-May.
Check out the four African longlisted titles below:
Curandera by Irenosen Okojie (Soft Skull Press, 2025)
Forthcoming this July, Curandera is a kaleidoscopic story of rebirth and redemption, and a mythic tale of metamorphic recalibrations across time, set between seventeenth-century Cape Verde and contemporary London. Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author. Her first novel, Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards.
Labelled as neither African nor European, Maud Blair tries to make sense of her mixed identity in the midst of political unrest and de facto apartheid, taking her to England via South Africa and back to post-independence Zimbabwe. The result is a strikingly original memoir that confronts privilege, prejudice and the place we call home.
The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia (Coffee House Press, 2025)
Coming out on April 22, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel chronicles the first weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist, author of The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008) and Silence Is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019; Graywolf Press, 2020).
The Wickedest by Caleb Femi (MCD, 2025)
Sweaty and cinematic, pulsing with rhythm and heat, every moment here—from one-on-one intimacies to the swell of the party’s collective roar—is refracted in Caleb Femi’s writing. Ingeniously blending conversations, text messages, sonnets, vignettes, monologues, photos, and lyrics, The Wickedest is a modern epic, told as a minute-by-minute chronicle of an unforgettable night out. Caleb Femi is a Nigerian-British author, film-maker, photographer, and former young people’s laureate for London. His first poetry collection Poor (Penguin Books Ltd., 2020) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Congratulations to the longlisted authors!
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