The Caine Prize for African Writing 2026 (£10,000 prize) – YOA

Deadline: February 27, 2026

Applications for the Caine Prize for African Writing 2026 at the moment are open. The Caine Prize for African Writing is a registered charity whose intention is to deliver African writing to a wider viewers utilizing their annual literary award.

In addition to administering the Prize, they work to attach readers with African writers by a collection of public occasions, in addition to serving to rising writers in Africa to enter the world of mainstream publishing by the annual Caine Prize writers’ workshop which takes place in a special African nation every year.

The tales written at Caine Prize workshops are printed yearly alongside the Prize’s shortlisted tales within the annual Caine Prize Anthology by Cassava Republic Press within the UK and publishers African nations together with, Jacana Media (South Africa), Cassava Republic (Nigeria), FEMRITE (Uganda), Gadsen Publishers (Zambia), ‘amaBooks (Zimbabwe), Langaa (Cameroon), and Mkuku na Nyota (Tanzania).

Prize

• Winner receives a money prize of £10,000. Four shortlisted writers obtain a money prize of £500 every.

Eligibility

• The story should have been printed within the 5 years previous the submissions deadline. For 2026 eligibility, the judges will solely take into account work printed between twenty seventh February 2021 and twenty seventh February 2026.
• Entries should be between 3,000 and 10,000 phrases in size.
• Entries should be submitted by a writer. This consists of publishers of bodily and digital books, literary journals, magazines, and humanities-oriented web sites. Kindly observe that the writer submitting the entry can’t even be the creator of the story.
• Writers should be over 18 years of age on the time of submission.
• Self-published and unpublished brief tales aren’t eligible.
• Publishers are inspired to submit a number of brief tales so long as they don’t submit multiple story by the identical creator.
• Stories could solely be entered for consideration for The Caine Prize for African Writing as soon as. Unfortunately, this implies that you could be not re-submit a narrative for consideration, even when it was not chosen for the shortlist.
• Genres not eligible for entry embody: novels, kids’s tales, factual writing, tutorial essays, performs, poetry, autobiography/biography, and any work that doesn’t represent a fictional brief story.
• Submissions should specify which African nation the creator comes from and the brief story phrase rely.
• Publishers should get hold of the consent of the creator earlier than submitting the brief story.
• When submitting digitally printed brief tales, kindly present a PDF model. Alternatively, you might as a substitute present a PDF containing a hyperlink to the publication.

Application

Submissions for The Caine Prize for African Writing open on Monday, 1 December 2025 (00:01 GMT) and shut on Friday, 27 February 2026 (12:00 GMT).

Click here to apply

For extra data, go to The Caine Prize for African Writing.