The Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature marked its tenth anniversary on Friday with an award ceremony at the University of Dar es Salaam, where Zanzibar’s Minister of Information, Culture, Arts and Sports, Dr. Riziki Pembe, presented this year’s winners. Tanzanian novelist Salim Hussein Ng’anzi took the fiction prize for his novel Mwanamkasi Ndio Basi (loosely, Mwanamkasi, That’s It!), while Ali Hilal Ali won the poetry category for his collection Diwani ya Vizikwa Vya Kale (The Anthology of the Ancient Ruins). Each walked away with $5,000. Ali, notably, is a repeat name in the prize’s history; he won the fiction category back in 2017, and that award-winning manuscript, translated into English by Meg Arenberg as The Swallower of Secrets, went on to win a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and is slated for release by University of Georgia Press in 2027.

Now in its second decade, the Safal Kiswahili Prize is run with backing from the Safal Group through its Mabati Rolling Mills and ALAF Tanzania subsidiaries, and this year’s judging panel — Prof. Rayya Timammy of the University of Nairobi, Dr. Masoud Mohammed of the State University of Zanzibar, and Prof. Austin Bukenya, formerly of Makerere University — worked through 230 submissions from seven countries to arrive at the winners. Runners-up in fiction and poetry, Dickson Damas Mtalaze and Lenard Barnaba Mtesigwa respectively, each received $2,500, and a new short story collection category was awarded for the first time this year, going to Kenyan writer Dominic Maina Oigo for Mbunge Mtarajiwa na Hadithi Nyingine (The Member of Parliament Elect and Other Stories). Organizers also noted a milestone: this is the first year a woman, Sophia Said Puta, has been shortlisted in the short story category.

Safal Group Chairman Sarit Shah used the occasion to reflect on a decade of investment in Kiswahili-language writing, framing the anniversary less as a victory lap than as a challenge to the newly minted laureates to help draw in a younger generation of readers and writers. That commitment to sustaining the language’s literary ecosystem extends beyond the prize money itself: winning entries are considered for Kiswahili publication by Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, and the winning poetry collection will be translated into English and published through the African Poetry Book Fund. To mark ten years of the prize specifically, Mkuki na Nyota has also released two anniversary anthologies, Tunu Mpya and Hazina Mpya, gathering work from every past first-prize winner.

Founded in 2014 by Dr. Lizzy Attree and Dr. Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, the Safal Kiswahili Prize has built itself into one of the more consequential engines for African-language publishing on the continent, incentivizing new writing in Kiswahili while actively pushing translation in both directions into and out of the language.

Congratulations to the winners!