Going international
After triumphantly trouncing 13 other manuscripts in the 2013 Peer Gynt Literary Contest, author Shadreck Chikoti’s novel, Azotus the Kingdom, has attracted fresh recognition.
This time around the novel, which describes Africa 500 years from now, is among the five entries shortlisted for the 2017 Nommo Awards for best speculative fiction by an African.
Chikoti’s Azotus the Kingdom will compete with Azanian Bridges by South African Nick Wood, Rosewater by Nigerian Tade Thompson, Blackass by another Nigerian author Igoni Barrett and Tatty Went West by another South African novelist Nikhil Singh.
While Chikoti carted home K500 000 for emerging number one in the local Peer Gynt competion, he now stands to win $1 000 (about K700 000) should sweet history decide to repeat itself. The monetary prize aside, a triumph in this particular contest will also entail the 37-year-old author stamping his footprints on the international literary scene.
“This is good news for me and the Malawi literary fraternity. I am elated; I fail to find words to express how I feel about it,” said Chikoti, who a couple of years ago founded the Story Club, a grouping of writers, critics and readers.
He added: “As you can see, there was stiff competition in the novel category and it is such an honour to be recognised beyond borders and to be in a company of some of the finest on the continent.”
And true to Chikoti’s word, his competitors are literary giants in their own right if their respective bio-data on the Nommo Awards website are to be believed. All the other four nominees are literary greats of international repute.
The Nommo Awards
The awards, according to information sourced from the African Speculative Fiction Society website, are given by the society, which is a body of African writers, editors, publishers and graphic artists.
The awards honour the best fantasy or science fiction works by Africans in four categories: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Short Story and Best Comic or Graphic Novel.
Chikoti’s futuristic book, Azotus the Kingdom, will compete in the Best Novel category.
Reads a statement on the website: “Benefactor Tom Ilube has provided funding for four years of the Nommo Awards and the award for the Best Novel is named in his honour—the Ilube Award for Best Speculative Fiction.”
The criterion for selecting the winner is that, over the next three months, members will vote for the winners in each category. The winners will be announced at the Ake Festival in Abeokuta, Nigeria in November this year.
The novel
Published by the Malawi Writers Union (Mawu) in 2015, Chikoti’s Azotus the Kingdom is set in a future world, hence small wonder it aptly qualified for the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction.
The protagonist is a man who lives in a futuristic world where he is a resident of a kingdom that is ‘perfect’ but does not allow for free thought. The novel features Kamoto and Tina as the main characters, struggling to escape this otherwise wild world.
Crucially, the novel questions two things: Power and freedom.
In a detailed review of the novel on www.olisa.tv, Socrates Mbamalu comments thus: “Chikoti, in a very simple way of writing and storytelling, leads us to ask important questions: Does freedom have a definition? Who controls the freedom of others? What comes off as a simple reading raises a series of complex philosophical questions.”
Mbamalu further states that much as Chikoti’s writing and sentence structures might not be mind-blowing or spectacular, there is no denying that what he writes is very important as humans are quick to forget and history is always eager to replay itself.
He says Chikoti takes the concept of freedom and the power of freedom and stretches both to every segment of life.
The author
Apart from Azotus the Kingdom, Chikoti’s other published works include Free Africa Flee! (2001) and Mwana wa Kamuzu (The Son of Kamuzu) (2010). His short story The Beggar Girl was included in the anthology Modern Stories from Malawi (2003), published by Mawu.
The Baobab Tree, for which he won third prize in the 2008 FMB/Mawu Literary Awards, was published in The Bachelor of Chikanda And Other Stories (2009).
“In 2011, I was selected to attend the Caine Prize African Writers’ Workshop in Cameroon, and the story I wrote while there, Child of a Hyena, was published in the Caine Prize 2011 anthology, To See the Mountain and other Stories,” says the author who is also director of Pan African Publishers.
In 2014, Chikoti was nominated by the Africa39 Project as one of the most promising 39 authors under the age of 40 from Sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora.
