Stephanie Bosch-Santana’s Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures has won the African Literature Association’s Award for Best First Book, presented last month at the ALA’s annual conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. The win makes Forms of Mobility one of the most decorated debut works of African literary scholarship in recent memory: earlier this year, we reported on the book winning the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize, which recognizes the best comparative literature book by a first-time author. Two major prizes, both for the same debut, in the same year.

The African Literature Association, founded in 1974, is the foremost professional organization for scholars, teachers, and writers working across African and African diaspora literatures. Its annual conference brings together critics, academics, and creative practitioners from across the world, and its book prizes have consistently recognized scholarship that expands the methodological and geographic boundaries of what African literary studies considers its archive. The Best First Book Award is among its most meaningful distinctions, specifically designed to honor the debut work most likely to reshape a conversation.

The ALA’s citation for Forms of Mobility describes the book as analyzing “an understudied archive of texts in English and Chichewa/Nyanja from Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia to offer an alternative account of contemporary African imaginations of mobility,” adding that by reading these texts “in motion,” Bosch-Santana reveals “forms of literary mobility and space-making that are occluded by current models of world literature.” It is a precise and generous summary of what the book actually does: it argues that the genres most widely circulated across southern Africa since the mid-twentieth century, migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, digital diaries, time machines, have been almost entirely ignored by world literature scholarship, and that taking them seriously requires changing not just the archive but the methodology.

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. That a book about Chichewa and English texts from Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, not the usual suspects of African literary scholarship, has now swept both the ACLA and ALA’s debut prizes is its own kind of argument: the field is being expanded, and that expansion is being recognized at its highest institutional levels.

Congratulations to Dr. Bosch-Santana. Forms of Mobility is available now from Northwestern University Press.