Nigeria’s Parrésia Publishers has won the $20,000 2026 CANEX Prize for Publishing for South Side by Akin Adesokan. The prize was awarded at CANEX WKND 2026 in Lagos. On Instagram, Parrésia called the win “a moment of great pride for Nigerian publishing” and a defining milestone in its journey, adding that it speaks to the power of thoughtful publishing and the value of African literature. South Side was one of the 13 books on the longlist Brittle Paper reported in October.

South Side is Adesokan’s second novel and ends a long wait for his fiction. It was published in May 2025 under Parrésia’s Regium imprint, more than two decades after his first novel, Roots in the Sky, which won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Fiction in manuscript form in 1996. According to The Guardian Nigeria, the book follows a writer struggling to find a voice and a place in a world where identities and loyalties keep shifting, and it examines home, homelessness, and being. Reviewers have read it as a novel of identity, displacement, and the search for belonging. Adesokan is Professor of Comparative Literature and of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Parrésia was founded in Lagos in 2012 by Azafi Omoluabi and Richard Ali, with the aim of selling books to Nigerian readers and promoting the freedom of the imagination and the free press. Its list includes Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms, published in 2015, which won the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2016.

The CANEX Prize is part of Afreximbank’s CANEX Book Factory and rewards a publisher’s whole craft, not just a manuscript, looking at editorial quality, design and production, innovation, distribution, and cultural impact. This year’s jury was chaired by Professor Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, with Professor Polo Moji and Khainga O’Okwemba. The prize widened its scope this year, opening to publishers from CARICOM member states. The other finalists, each receiving $2,000, were Naa-Adei Kotey’s Sumanguru: Sorcerer King of Sosso (Masobe Books), Chitra Nagarajan’s The World Was in Our Hands (Cassava Republic Press), Bento Baloi’s Beneath the Scar(Editora Trinta Zero Nove), and Lee Johnson’s Mixing Memory & Desire (Ian Randle Publishers).

The win continues a short but striking run for Nigerian houses. Cassava Republic Press took the inaugural prize in 2024 for Pumla Dineo Gqola’s Female Fear Factory, and Cape Town’s Karavan Press won in 2025 for Thobeka Yose’s In Silence My Heart Speaks. Congratulations to Parrésia and to Akin Adesokan.