A huge congratulations to Nigerian writer Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor, whose short story All Our Lives has been chosen as the recipient of this year's ROSL Readers' Award.
ROSL has been supporting the Caine Prize since 2000, providing accommodation for the finalists while in London and hosting readings of their works at the clubhouse, but since 2018 ROSL members have had the chance to vote for their favourite alongside the main prize.
The winner, Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor is a Nigerian writer whose work has appeared in the 2018 Best of the Net, the 2019 Best Small Fictions, The Guardian, Harvard's Transition Magazine, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. A 2018 Rhodes Scholar finalist and a 2018 Kathy Fish Fellow, he has won the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize for Short Fiction. He has been shortlisted for the 2017 Awele Creative Trust Award, the 2016 Problem House Press Short Story Prize, and the 2016 Southern Pacific Review Short Story Prize. He lives in Pittsburgh, USA, and is at work on a novel and a short story collection. Read All Our Lives here.
As winner of the ROSL Readers' Award, he will now be commissioned to write an original short for Overseas, which will be published early next year. Last year, it was Malaysia-based Nigerian writer Wole Talabi who took home the award. His short story, Debut, which explored the future of art and artificial intelligence, appeared in the March-May 2019 edition of Overseas. You can read his work here.
A huge congratulations again to Tochukwu, we look forward to reading his new work next year!
