Skip to main content

AFREADA x Africa Writes Present: Warsan Shire Flash Fiction Competition

AFREADA x Africa Writes Present: Warsan Shire Flash Fiction Competition

The UK’s biggest annual African literature festival is just around the corner and, as the creatures of habit that we are, we’ve decided to return with the AFREADA x Africa Writes Competition.

This year’s exciting programme will showcase the very best writers and writing from the continent and the diaspora, including none other than the much-loved, Somali British poet, Warsan Shire, who will be in conversation on Sunday, 1st July at the British Library.

We asked Warsan to come through with a writing prompt, and she certainly didn’t disappoint. We are inviting writers, anywhere and everywhere, to participate in a 500-word flash fiction competition based on this striking line from the poem, The House. It reads:

 

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women. 

 

If you know anything about AFREADA competitions, you’ll know that we like to keep it simple with the rules. All you have to do is read this prompt until you begin to see colours and hear sounds. Read it until the sounds become voices and the voices become conversations between characters… then use all that wonderful creative energy to write a fictional story.

We are offering a £100 cash prize to the winning entry, which will be selected by Warsan Shire, announced at her headline event at Africa Writes, and published in AFREADA.

So if you think you’ve got what it takes (or even if you’re riddled with fear and self-doubt), read the guidelines below and get to work!

Entry Guidelines:

  • All entries must be no more than 500 words.
  • All entries must be emailed to editor@afreada.com as Microsoft Word attachments (.doc or .docx format).
  • 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: Friday, 15th June. 23:59 BST.

Questions? Click here and go straight to the comment section.



from Africa Writes https://ift.tt/2rKwJxc

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...