Yemisi Aribisala and Omer Al Tijani have both won at the 14th annual Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards, announced on Wednesday evening at a ceremony hosted by Andi Oliver and Angela Hartnett OBE at The Royal Exchange in London.

Aribisala won the Food Writer award for her work in Vittles and Scribehound Food, writing that the judges recognised for bringing together culture, identity, and food through a voice that is wholly her own. For those who have followed her since Longthroat Memoirs, her landmark 2017 collection on Nigerian food and the literature of eating, this is simply confirmation of what has always been evident: that Aribisala is one of the most distinctive food writers working anywhere in the world today, not merely in Africa or the Nigerian tradition. Her shortlist rivals were James Morton and Safiya Robinson, both formidable. She won.

Omer Al Tijani took the Debut Cookery Book award for The Sudanese Kitchen (Almas Art Foundation), described by the judges as a landmark work capturing the breadth of Sudan’s culinary traditions through recipes, history, and personal stories. It is a book that arrives at a moment when Sudan is rarely in the news for anything but devastation, and its existence, and now its recognition, carries weight beyond the literary. Al Tijani beat a competitive shortlist that included Kenji Morimoto’s FERMENT and Anna Ansari’s Silk Roads.

The Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards are among the most prestigious honours in food and drink writing and broadcasting in the UK and Republic of Ireland. That two African writers have won in the same year, one Nigerian, one British-Sudanese, is not a small thing. Congratulations to Aribisala and Al Tijani!