New Visions, New Voices

[...]in the state of re-desertification into which the region's literary production had fallen back in the 1980s and 1990s, critics, readers, and teachers found themselves constantly thrashing out topics by the same old authors, authors whose concerns and the implications of which had become "anachronistic and tedious." Doreen Baingana's debut collection of short stories, Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe (2005), has been laurelled with prizes, including the AWP Short Fiction Award, the Washington Independent Writers Fiction prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for First Best Book, Africa Region. The regional visibility garnered through the Caine Prize for African Writing has also been seen as a promise of sorts, a statement of things to come. Since its inception in 2000, half the winners of the prestigious award have been East African: Sudanese Leila Aboulela (2000), Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (2003), and Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko (2007). According to the Kwani? website, the journal is "dedicated to nurturing and developing Kenya's and Africa's intellectual and creative resources through strategic literary interventions."