They've announced the shortlist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, and the shortlisted stories (yes, it's a story prize: "Indicative length is between 3000 and 10,000 words") can be read via links on that page (but: all in the dreaded pdf format).
This year there's a pronounced shift away from western Africa (i.e. Nigeria, which had four of last year's five finalists), but the finalists are, yet again, all sub-Saharan, and the works were all originally written in English (admirably, works in translation are eligible, though they still have to have been published in English somewhere -- but it seems to have been quite a while since any such story made the cut).
One (other) work by a finalist -- Tendai Huchu's The Hairdresser of Harare -- is under review at the complete review.
This year there's a pronounced shift away from western Africa (i.e. Nigeria, which had four of last year's five finalists), but the finalists are, yet again, all sub-Saharan, and the works were all originally written in English (admirably, works in translation are eligible, though they still have to have been published in English somewhere -- but it seems to have been quite a while since any such story made the cut).
One (other) work by a finalist -- Tendai Huchu's The Hairdresser of Harare -- is under review at the complete review.