Zambian writer, Mubanga Kalimamukwento, has been announced as the winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
Kalimamukwento is the first Zambian to win the literary prize. Perks of this prize include $15,000 in cash and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press, with support in the nationwide promotion of her work, a collection of short stories titled Obligations to the Wounded.
Reacting to the announcement, Kalimamukwento remarked, “This is a prize I have been reading and entering for years, so a win is a kind of ‘Finally’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’ moment for me.”
Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Adda, Aster(ix), Overland, the Red Rock Review, Menelique, and elsewhere.
Her book, Obligations to the Wounded, employs proverbs and short stories rooted in Zambian languages, culture and place to examine the cost of womanhood through the voices of 12 women and girls The stories illustrate women’s burdens through the lens of religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence and racial discrimination.
The Drue Heinz Literature Prize is an American literary award for short fiction written in the English Language. Run by the University of Pittsburgh Press in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, the Prize was initiated in 1981 by Drue Heinz and developed by Frederick A. Hetzel. The award recognises and supports writers of short fiction, and it is open to authors who have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals. Past winners include Stewart O’Nan, Elizabeth Graver, Caroline Kim, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Ramona Reeves.
Manuscripts are judged anonymously by writers who are nationally known in the United States. Past judges have included Robert Penn Warren, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Deesha Philyaw, and Joan Didion. Jane McCafferty is the managing editor for the Drue Heinz Prize, which is announced in February of each year.
Obligations to the Wounded will be published in hardcover October 8th, 2024.