US-based Zambian writer Namwali Serpell has
promised to share her winnings in the Caine Prize for African Writing with the
runners up.
She received the £10,000 ($15,600) prize
for her short story The Sack.
The judges described it as
"innovative, stylistically stunning, haunting and enigmatic".
Ms Serpell was among five writers
short-listed for the prize, regarded as Africa's leading literary award.
Two South Africans and two Nigerians were
also shortlisted for the prize - Masande Ntshanga for Space, FT Kola for A
Party for the Colonel, Elnathan John for Flying and Segun Afolabi for The
Folded Leaf.
Ms Serpell told BBC Newsday that
the promise to share the winnings was "an act of mutiny".
"I wanted to change the structure of
the prize.
"It is very awkward to be placed into
this position of competition with other writers that you respect immensely and
you feel yourself put into a sort of American idol or race-horse situation when
actually, you all want to support each other."
The chair of judges, Zoe Wicomb, awarded
the prize at a dinner held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in the
UK.
The short story "yields fresh meaning
with every reading," she said.
In The Sack, two men who live together their
whole lives love one women but don't know which one of them she loves.
"One of the men has a series of
backwards moving dreams about his own death and he becomes very paranoid about
the other man," Ms Serpell said.
BBC
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