THE CAINE PRIZE RULES

 

ELIGIBILITY

• Unpublished work is not eligible for the Caine Prize.
• Submissions should be made by publishers only.
• Only one story per author will be considered in any one year.

• We require 6 copies of the work in its originally published version.
• If the work is published in a book or journal, we would like to receive at least one copy of the book / journal and five photocopies; but particularly where several stories are submitted from one anthology we would like if possible to receive six copies of the book / journal itself.

• If the work is published online, we would like to receive six photocopies.

• Only fictional work is eligible.

Please note that works which do not conform to the criteria will not be considered for the prize. Please do not waste your own time and postage by sending in material which is unsuitable. Works not eligible for entry include stories for children, factual writing, plays, biography, works shorter than 3000 words and unpublished work. If you are not sure whether your work is eligible, please email us for advice.

HOW TO ENTER

Publishers should post six hard copies of the story for consideration to:

Nick Elam
The Caine Prize for African Writing
The Menier Gallery
Menier Chocolate Factory
51 Southwark Street
London SE1 1RU

Entries should be accompanied by a letter from the publisher conveying a short CV or brief biography of the writer, and specifying which African country the writer comes from.

FULL RULES

The Prize is awarded to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. Indicative length is between 3000 and 10,000 words.

“An African writer” is taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African, and whose work has reflected African sensibilities.

There is a cash prize of £10,000 for the winning author and a travel award for each of the short-listed candidates (up to five in all).

For practical reasons, unpublished work and work in other languages is not eligible. Works translated into English from other languages are not be excluded, provided they have been published in translation, and should such a work win, a proportion of the prize would be awarded to the translator.

The award is made in July each year, the deadline for submissions being 31 January. Works received after that date will be put forward to the next year's prize. The short-list is selected from work originally published in the five years preceding the submissions deadline and not previously considered for a Caine Prize. The deadline for the next prize is 31 January 2012; works must have been published between 1 February 2007 and the closing date.

In general it is unwise to delay the submission of entries until shortly before the deadline: postal and delivery hiccups can easily result in material arriving too late. It is far better to submit material a few weeks in advance.

NB: There is no application form. Submissions should be made by publishers, in the form of six original published copies of the work for consideration. If published in a magazine or journal we will accept one original copy plus five photocopies, but would prefer six original copies. These should be sent to the address below.

We are happy to take submissions from internet magazines, but must insist that we receive six hard copies of these, as of other submissions. Also it is important that internet entries be carefully edited: past judges have not viewed favourably entries containing typos and other errors.

The judges will consider only one work per writer in any one year, and only short stories are eligible.

Every effort is made to publicise the work of the short-listed authors through the broadcast as well as the printed media.

Winning and short-listed authors will be invited to participate in writers’ workshops in Africa, London and elsewhere as resources permit.

For further information, please contact Nick Elam at The Caine Prize for African Writing and Jenny Casswell at Raitt Orr and Associates (details below).

For further information please contact:

Jenny Casswell
Raitt Orr & Associates Ltd
The Africa Centre
38 King Street
London
WC2E 8JT

Tel: 020 7836 4644
E-mail: jenny@raittorr.co.uk

Nick Elam
The Caine Prize for African Writing
The Menier Gallery
Menier Chocolate Factory
51 Southwark Street
London SE1 1RU

Tel: 020 7378 6234
E-mail: info@caineprize.com

2nd Annual Poetry Contest

The Festival is pleased to announce our 2nd Annual Poetry Contest. We will be accepting submissions by mail and online from April 18—August 18, 2011. Have a question about one of our writing contests? Please send questions to: contests@tennesseewilliams.net. Grand Prize: $1,000 VIP All Access Pass ($500 value) for the 26th annual Festival: March 21-25, 2012 Publication in Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine Public Reading at the 2012 Festival   Judge: Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane Deadline: August 18, 2011 (postmark). The top ten finalists will receive a panel pass ($75 value) to attend the 2012 Festival, and their names will be published on www.tennesseewilliams.net. Winner will be announced by January 16, 2012. Guidelines: Submit 2-4 original poems of any style or theme, written in English, with a combined length of up to 400 lines. Include a separate cover page with name of collection, poem titles, number of total lines, plus poet’s name, address, phone, and email address. Give your collection of poems a title. Include this title on the first page of the manuscript, above the title of the first poem in the collection. Number all pages in your entry (not including cover page). Author’s name should only appear on cover page. Unlimited entries per person. Simultaneous submissions accepted. Please notify the Festival if your work is accepted elsewhere. Eligibility: Only open to writers who have not yet published a book of poetry. Authors who have self-published or have published chapbooks are eligible provided that their poetry collection does not have an ISBN number. Authors who have published in other genres are eligible. Only previously unpublished poems accepted. Entry Fee: $20 Manuscripts will not be returned. To enter online: See below. Electronic submissions are preferred and must be in .doc, .rtf or PDF formats. If you are using the latest version of Microsoft Word, please save your submission as .doc and not a .docx file before sending it to us. We accept entry fees via Discover, MasterCard and Visa only. To enter by mail: Send your manuscript and check or money order for $20 (made out to the: Tennessee Williams Literary Festival) to: Poetry Contest Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival 938 Lafayette Street, Suite 514 New Orleans, LA 70113. Do not send submissions by certified mail or signature required delivery. Poetry Contest Online Submission Step 1: Entry Fee To begin the contest submission process by paying your $20 entry fee, click the button below. Once you've paid your entry fee, you'll be taken to the Entry Submission form to provide additional information and upload your contest entry. Read the contest eligibility rules and guidelines above BEFORE you begin the online submission process. Submission fees are non-refundable.

Third Annual Short Fiction Contest

 

We are pleased to announce the Saints and Sinners GLBT Literary Festival’s Third Annual Short Fiction Contest. SAS Fest is seeking original, unpublished short stories between 5,000 and 7,000 words with GLBT content on the broad theme of “Saints and Sinners.”

Judge: Dorothy Allison. The author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller, Allison will select the winning stories.

Prize: One grand prize of $250 and two second place prizes of $50 will be awarded. In addition, the top stories will be published in an anthology from QueerMojo, an imprint of Rebel Satori Press. There will also be a book release party to promote the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans May, 2012.

Have a question about one of our writing contests? Please send questions to: contests@tennesseewilliams.net.

Eligibility:

• The contest is open to authors at all stages of their careers and to stories in all genres.
• Only previously unpublished stories will be accepted.
• Stories that won this contest in previous years are ineligible; their authors remain eligible but must submit new work.
• Stories submitted to this contest in previous years that did not place are eligible.
• Stories that have won any other writing contest are ineligible.

Guidelines:

• Submissions should be in standard manuscript format (double-spaced, one inch margins, 12 point font). Please include a word count on first page under the title.
• Your name and contact information should NOT appear on the manuscript.
• No bios or resumes. We only consider manuscript quality.
• Word Count: 5,000 to 7,000
• Submit only original, unpublished short stories.
• Theme (interpret as you wish): Saints and Sinners

Entry fee: $15 per story. There is no limit on the number of stories each author may enter.

Deadline: December 1, 2011 (postmark)

To enter by mail: download an entry form from www.sasfest.com and send 2 copies of each story with a completed entry form to

Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest
938 Lafayette Street, Suite 514
New Orleans, LA 70113

To enter online: Click the button below to pay online and upload your script. One script per transaction please. To enter more than one script, please complete the online entry process for each entry.

---

Fiction Contest Online Submission Step 1: Entry Fee

To begin the Fiction Contest submission process by paying your $25 entry fee, click the button below. Once you’ve paid your entry fee, you’ll be taken to the Entry Submission form to provide additional information and upload your contest entry.
Read the contest eligibility rules and guidelines above BEFORE you begin the online submission process. Submission fees are non-refundable.

The Unmasking of Mr. Divine:

Is He God?, 1936 

Wherein Mrs. M.C. Vellinga attributes the power of evangelist and preacher Father Divine to “Black Magic”

Father Divine, in full Father Major Jealous Divine, original name George Baker (1880?—1965), prominent African-American religious leader of the 1930s. The Depression-era movement he founded, the Peace Mission, was originally dismissed as a cult, but it still exists and is now generally hailed as an important precursor of the Civil Rights Movement…

In 1933 Father Divine and his followers left Sayville for Harlem, where he became one of the most flamboyant leaders of the Depression era. There he opened the first of his Heavens, the residential hotels where his teachings were practiced and where his followers could obtain food, shelter, and job opportunities, as well as spiritual and physical healing.

The movement[’s] [racially diverse] membership numbered in the tens of thousands at its height during the Great Depression…Father Divine’s teachings were codified in 1936 in the “Righteous Government Platform,” which called for an end to segregation, lynching, and capital punishment.

During the Depression residents of the Heavens paid the minimal fee of 15 cents for meals and a dollar per week for sleeping quarters, a practice that allowed them to maintain their sense of dignity. In the opinion of many, Father Divine affirmed, amid the poverty of the Depression, the abundance of God with the free lavish banquets he held daily.

Wole Soyinka's

'visions of the possible'

On a rare visit to the UK in support of London theatre company Collective Artistes, of which he is a patron, the Nobel prize-winning Nigerian poet and dramatist talks to Sarah Crown about his fears for his country and using theatre to 'fire pellets at the complacent body of society'

Video: Black Europe:

African Presence in

the Formation of Europe

JULY 21, 2009 – 1:43 PM

Bradley Manning, the Person:

The Making of the World's

Most Notorious Leaker

By Alexis Madrigal

Jul 13 2011

 

Transcripts of chats with Adrian Lamo give us new insight into the making of Manning's conscience

"hi," he said. "how are you?"

That's how it all started. WikiLeaks' elevation to international geopolitical phenomenon. The State Department's embarrassment. Bradley Manning's detention. Adrian Lamo's public shaming by the hacker community. Julian Assange's assumption of the role of global supervillain. The reevaluation of what journalism is or should be in the age of Big Data.

That greeting was the first thing that supposed WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning said to Adrian Lamo, who turned him in. Manning goes on to confess in quite specific terms what he'd done, which was to exfiltrate hundreds of thousands of documents from an intelligence system known as SIPRNET on rewriteable CDs and send to Julian Assange, who he calls a "crazy white haired aussie who can't seem to stay in one country very long."

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the chat logs Wired just released from supposed details about a 45 million-strong botnet to the hidden network of queer activists within the military to new details on how Lamo gained Manning's trust. I'm sure other sites will pull out those details.

What I want to focus on is Bradley Manning the person. Throughout the chats, he refers to himself as a "ghost" or "ghostly," and in the WikiLeaks affair, he's been precisely that. While Assange, Lamo, and a host of other figures have gotten top billing, Manning's been held in military detention under rough conditions that even former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley called "counterproductive" and "stupid."

He was the conscience that sparked these international controversies. He was the human being who felt he had to speak out. And he was a very confused young man in an incredible amount of psychological pain. I want to flesh him out, to unghost him a little for you. If we, as a country, are going to imprison Manning for what he's done, we owe it to him to understand him. If we, as a country, are going to hold him in conditions that the United Nations wants to investigate, we owe it to him to try to figure out why he did what he did.

The chat logs make for psychologically grueling reading. One because Manning is obviously hurting and *we know things turn out for him* but two, the argot of internet chat makes the whole thing feel breezy and disjointed. So, I'm laying out Bradley Manning's story here, using his own words wherever possible, in a format that's easier to follow and digest.

Bradley Manning was born in central Oklahoma and grew up in Crescent, north of Oklahoma City. Manning saw it as a "highly evangelical" town, though self-reported stats don't show it to be particularly religious. His father was a programmer with Hertz, so there were a lot of gadgets around to play with. Manning was, by his own estimation short, "very effeminate" and "very intelligent," and all three traits were obvious from a young age. He "could read at 3 and multiply / divide by 4." He loved computers and was "glued to a computer screen" as a kid, "obsessively" playing the original SimCity.

By kindergarten, he'd already become a target for harassment both at school and at home. Kids called him a girly boy or a teacher's pet. His father was an alcoholic and abusive, Manning tells Lamo. Manning the boy retreated into learning things. "My favorite things growing up were reading my encyclopaedia, watching PBS (the only channel i could get on my TV) building with lego, and playing on my dad's hand-me-down computers." He participated in science fairs, but also figured that if he became an athlete, he might get picked on less. He joined sports teams.

In middle school, his parents got divorced after a particularly ugly incident.

"my father in a drunken stupor got angry with me because i was doing some noisy homework while he was watching TV... he went into his bedroom, pulled out a shotgun, and chased me out of the house... the door was deadbolted, so i couldn't get out before he caught up with me... so my mother (also wasted) threw a lamp over his head... and i proceeded to fight him, breaking his nose, and made it out of the house... my father let off one or two shots, causing damage, but injuring nobody, except for the belt lashing i got for "making him shoot up the house"

His teachers noticed his wounds and "social workers got involved." His mother filed for divorce and attempted suicide. After she got better, she got custody of Manning and went home to her hometown in Wales in the UK. School became less of a priority and Manning tried to get a startup going, "AngelDyne.com - Pembrokeshire's finest online network." It didn't really work out. At that point, his mother started having strokes and Manning managed to get back to the States after accidentally stumbling through the July 7 bombings in London.

During this period, Manning had come to grips with the fact that he was gay. "Sexual orientation was easy to figure out." He joined the Army in October 2007 anyway, despite the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy then in effect. It appears he found some support among other people in the armed forces who supported the repeal of that (odious) policy.

Still, it was an isolated life, particularly after he got shipped off to Baghdad in late 2009. The desert was terrible.

"here, its hot, dry... and fucking hot. [double emphasis on hot] its also rather dusty. i'd prefer the heat over the peanut butter that forms when it rains. i grow 3 inches in height when it rains here," he wrote. "its a desert, but the ground is slightly fertile here... its a fine silt that forms clay. 'fertile crescent.' vegetation is sparse... an odd mixture of deciduous and tropical trees and shrubs. and usually keeled over slightly, from wind erosion."

He took the whole experience in but it didn't help.

Manning had lost his "emotional support channels" and was stuck "with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors." That was particularly bad because Manning was struggling with another revelation about himself: he was transsexual. As he told Lamo, "the only safe place i seem to have is this satellite internet connection."

It's here that Manning's personal drama began to intersect with the world's. He'd "loved" his job at times, despite it all, but one day he saw this happen:

was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police... for printing "anti-Iraqi literature"... the iraqi federal police wouldn't cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the "bad guys" were, and how significant this was for the FPs... it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki... i had an interpreter read it for me... and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet... i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on... he didn't want to hear any of it... he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees...everything started slipping after that... i saw things differently. i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth... but that was a point where i was a *part* of something... i was actively involved in something that i was completely against...

Manning's conscience started to turn against the war in which he was involved. Suddenly, the network he was sitting on became a possible tool to do good for the world. "if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time... say, 8-9 months... and you saw incredible things, awful things... things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC... what would you do?"

We think we know what Manning did. And we think we know he acted out of conscience based on the statement above and several other hints from the chat logs. He found the machinations of first world governments "exploiting" third world ones to be disgusting, and he really wanted to change how the world worked. He hoped "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms" would result from the release of the documents he passed on.

Now, here's the big question: more than a million people had access to the documents Manning did. None of them decided to leak the documents. Sure, some of them couldn't have pulled it off technically (without getting caught). But clearly Manning's mind and conscience was also working in a different way from the rest of the people with access. If the Iraqi Federal Police incident was the trigger, he still had to be receptive. I think the newly released portions of the chat logs actually give us some insight into the making of Bradley Manning.

"i guess i could start electrolysis as soon im back in the states... even before im outprocessed ," he wrote. "still gonna be weird watching the world change on the macro scale, while my life changes on the micro." Like most people, he couldn't help seeing his own life woven through the bigger story. His electrolysis was on the same scale as threatening the most powerful government in the world's concerns. That feels off, something like getting hungry on September 11, 2001, and yet people got hungry on September 11, 2001.

If I can be allowed a little psychological extrapolation, it's not hard to see Manning's private dilemma -- his feelings of being an outsider, of being powerless, of being weak -- letting him sympathize with the targets of powerful US organizations like the State Department and military. And the solution to his gender identity problem was the same as the one for geopolitics: everything had to come out. Secrets were corrosive at all levels.

In January of 2010, Manning was allegedly in the process of leaking the many, many documents to Julian Assange's organization. At the same time, he was also publicly cross-dressing for a substantial period of time while on leave.

"i went on leave in late january / early february... and... i cross-dressed, full on... wig, breastforms, dress, the works... i had crossdressed before... but i was public... for a few days," he wrote. "i blended in....no-one knew. the first thing i learned was that chivalry isn't dead... men would walk out of their way and open doors for me... it was so weird. i was referred to as "Ma'am" or "Miss" at places like Starbucks and McDonalds (hey, im not a fancy eater)."

Manning finally felt like himself, like he didn't have to hide anything. "i mean, i dont think its normal for people to spend this much time worrying about whether they're behaving masculine enough, whether what they're going to say is going to be perceived as 'gay'... not to mention how i feel about the situation..." he wrote. "for whatever reason, im not comfortable with myself... i mean, i behave and look like a male, but its not 'me'"

It's incredible to think that as Manning was allegedly passing off the biggest data leak in US government history, he was experimenting with a different kind of transparency and public display of previously secret information. He rode the Acela. He went into gas stations to buy cigarettes. He did normal things.

A few months later, after Lamo told military officials he knew about Manning, Manning was arrested and he's been held ever since. He's awaiting a trial to find out if he'll be court-martialed.

The last thing he said in the chat logs was, "ive seen far more than a 22 y/o should."

Image: Creative Commons.

++++++++++++++++++++

ALEXIS MADRIGAL - Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author ofPowering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More

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Black Teens and Suicide:

For the Love of Siwe

The devastating issue hit home for Bassey Ikpi when a family friend committed suicide at 15. Sadly, there are so many more like Siwe Monsanto.

• By: Bassey Ikpi | Posted: July 13, 2011 

Baaba Maal

Music Break /

Baaba Maal and Duggy Tee

July 13, 2011

by Boima Tucker

My Brooklyn neighborhood is a center for Pulaar speakers in the United States. The community has its own association, a significant proportion of the local masjids’ membership, and plenty of great restaurants that provide food from countries like Sierra Leone, Guinea, Senegal, and Mali. Baaba Maal and Duggy Tee get together on a track that would make the neighborhood proud.