Skip to main content

AFREADA x Africa Writes Presents: Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty competition

Photo cred: @inspirit_pages via Instagram

With acclaimed Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou joining Africa Writes on July 2nd,  we’ve teamed up with AFREADA to run a global writing competition with the chance to win £100!

We are inviting writers, anywhere and everywhere, to participate in a 500-word short story competition which is loosely based on Mabanckou’s amusing and heart-warming story, Tomorrow I’ll be Twenty. Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Michel living in Pointe Noire, Congo, the story begins:

In this country, a boss should always be bald and have a big belly. My uncle isn’t bald, he hasn’t got a big belly, and you don’t realise, the first time you see him, that he is the actual boss of a big office in the centre of town…

The rules are simple: …open a Word Document and continue the story.

We want you to pick up where Mabanckou left off, but you are not bound by the circumstances of this particular story. Go wherever the spirit leads but be mindful of our one and only rule: the story must be told from the perspective of a child living somewhere in Africa.

We are offering a £100 cash prize to the winning story, which will be published in AFREADA, and announced at the Africa Writes opening R.A.P party on June 30th.

If you think you’ve got what it takes, read the guidelines below and get to work!

Entry Guidelines:

• All entries MUST start with the opening lines of Tomorrow I’ll be Twenty, by Alain Mabanckou.
• All entries must be no more than 500 words (including the excerpt)
• All entries must be emailed to editor@afreada.com as Microsoft Word attachments.
• Please put “AFREADA x Africa Writes Competition – Your Full Name” in the subject line.
• In the body of the email, please include your contact details, social media handles and a short bio (100 words max).
• Deadline: Sunday, 18th June. 23:59 BST.

 



from Africa Writes http://ift.tt/2q0dmND

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...