Discovering Home.

A SELECTION OF WRITINGS FROM THE 2002 CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING. Jacana (South Africa) ISBN 1-919931-55-4

The Caine Prize for African Writing is awarded annually for a short story by an African writer published in English. Now in its fourth year, the Caine Prize has become Africa's most prestigious literary prize. Each year, coinciding with the awards ceremony held at Oxford University in the UK, a compilation of the previous year's short listed entries is published.

Discovering Home is the 2002 collection. But this book differs from earlier years in also including 14 stories created during eight days of writing workshops inaugurated for the first time this year by the Caine Prize committee. They were held last March at the Monkey Valley resort at Noordhoek, near Cape Town, South Africa.

Attending these workshops were two Caine prizewinners, Helon Habila of Nigeria (2001) and Binyavanga Wainana of Kenya (2002), four short-listed candidates from 2000 2002, two 'near misses' and four other young writers.

Veronique Tadjo, a Caine Prize judge in 2000 and 2001, with Peter Merrington from the creative writing department of the University of the Western Cape, acted as the workshop's 'animators', and both contribute a short story for this collection.

It is a requirement of any story submitted to the Caine Prize that it should be previously published. Recognising the difficulties many African writers have in getting their work into print, last year the Caine Prize administrators specifically widened its criteria to include stories published on the web. Two shortlisted entrants to the 2002 Caine Prize, Binyanvanga Wainaina and Amanda Ngozi Adichie, had been published on the literary website G21Net. Included in this book are their stories shortlisted in 2002, along with stories they created at the Monkey Valley workshops.

Wainaina went on to win the 2002 prize, and with part of the $15,000 prize money he inaugurated, and now edits, a new literary magazine in cyberspace (www. kwani.org). The 2003 Caine Prize winning story, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's Weight of Whispers was one of the first stories he decided to feature on the site, but readers will have to wait for next year's collection to read it in a print format.

Despite a general downturn in African publishing, highlighted by Heinemann's recent decision to axe its African Writers Series imprint, this book is clear evidence of the continent's wealth of writing talent. Thanks to the Caine Prize, and all the writers involved, Africa's literary output is receiving the sort of international exposure it deserves. Now it's up to publishers, both ha Africa and overseas, to lend their commercial support (as Jacana has done) to the literary, potential that still lies, largely untapped, throughout Africa.