Stephanie Bosch Santana’s Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures (Northwestern University Press, 2025) has won the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, awarded annually to the best comparative literature book by a first-time author. The prize was presented on 27 February 2026 at the ACLA’s annual meeting in Montreal.

The book examines five under-studied forms of fiction — migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, digital diaries, and time machines — drawing on thousands of stories and articles from print periodicals and digital media in Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, working across English and Chichewa/Nyanja. Its central argument is that the genres most widely circulated across southern Africa since the mid-twentieth century have been almost entirely ignored by world literature scholarship, and that reading them reveals aspects of African and Black diasporic life that the novel alone cannot. In its citation, the prize committee praised the book for showing that “literary scholars must find ways to criss-cross print and digital media and to examine literary cultures at multiple scales, not to mention abandon any narrow generic and linguistic focus on the African novel in English or French,” describing the result as reimagining “the maps and tools of literary comparison with admirable creativity, precision and elegance.”

Bosch Santana is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA and co-founder of the Malawian Girls Short Story Competition. Forms of Mobility is published in Northwestern University Press’s FlashPoints series and is available now.