The Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards, one of Britain’s most prestigious honours in food writing and broadcasting, has announced its 2026 shortlist, and among the names selected by the independent judging panel are two writers whose work centres African food as a subject worthy of serious literary and cultural attention: Nigerian essayist Yemisí Aríbisálà and British-Sudanese chef and food archivist Omer Al Tijani.

Aríbisálà, whose debut book Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex, and the Nigerian Taste Buds won the John Avery Prize at the André Simon Book Awards in 2016, is shortlisted in the Food Writer category for her work published in Vittles and Scribehound Food. She is a Nigerian essayist, writer, painter, and food memoirist widely described as bringing a fearless, witty, and unapologetic voice to her craft, and has spent over a decade building the case that Nigerian food is one of the richest sites of cultural and political inquiry on the continent. Her selection in a category that also includes writers published in the FT Weekend Magazine and Chicken + Bread Zine signals that the work she has been doing in independent literary food publications is receiving the recognition it has long warranted.

Al Tijani’s shortlisting, in the Debut Cookery Book category, is for The Sudanese Kitchen, a work that carries considerably more weight than the average cookbook. Al Tijani has spent much of his forty years in the UK, far from the kitchens of his childhood in Bahri and Khartoum, and the book began as a private effort to write down the recipes he could remember and learn from family members. It turned out to be an act of cultural preservation: the first milestone work of its kind to document Sudanese cuisine in English as a whole, featuring over 100 recipes alongside short anecdotes and personal stories. Al Tijani has been explicit that for him, the work is inseparable from Sudan’s ongoing crisis, “food is politics,” he has said in a conversation with Radical Books Collective, “the documenting of cuisine and culture is an act of resistance against the ongoing oppression that we have been experiencing in Sudan.” That a book with this level of political and archival ambition is now shortlisted at one of Britain’s most establishment literary food awards is not a small thing.

The winners across all twelve categories will be announced on Friday, May 1, 2026. The full shortlist is at fortnumandmason.com.