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Lesley Nneka Arimah, a Nigerian author has won the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing – often described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled “Skinned”, published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Issue 53) 2018.
Dr. Peter Kimani, Chair of Judges declared Lesley the winner of the £10,000 prize at an award dinner on Monday 8th July.
The ceremony was held for the third time in Senate House, in partnership with SOAS and the Centre for African Studies.
‘Skinned’ pictures a society in which young girls are ceremonially ‘uncovered’ and must marry in order to regain the right to be clothed. It tells the story of Ejem, a young woman uncovered at the age of fifteen yet ‘unclaimed’ in adulthood, and her attempts to negotiate a strictly stratified society following the breakdown of a protective friendship with the married Chidinma. With a wit, foresight, and a wicked imagination, ‘Skinned’ is a bold and unsettling tale of bodily autonomy and womanhood, and the fault lines along which solidarities are formed and broken.
While announcing the award, Peter Kimani said: “The winner of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing is a unique retake of women’s struggle for inclusion in a society regulated by rituals. Lesley Nneka Arimah’s Skinned defamiliarizes the familiar to topple social hierarchies, challenge traditions and envision new possibilities for women of the world. Using a sprightly diction, she invents a dystopian universe inhabited by unforgettable characters where friendship is tested, innocence is lost, and readers gain a new understanding of life.”
Arimah was born in London in 1983. Her work has been published in The New Yorker and Granta
In 2015, her story “Light” won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. In 2016, 2017, and 2019, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize. She won the 2019 edition with her story “Skinned”.
In September 2017, she was named as one of the fiction writers honored by the National Book Foundation, called “Five Under 35”