A KENYAN and a Kenya resident, Parselelo Kantai and Aidan Hartley, have been shortlisted for the 2004 Caine Prize and BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2004 literary awards, respectively.

A shortlist of five African writers, which also includes two Ugandans, Doreen Baingana and Monica Arac de Nyeko has been closed by the panel of judges for this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing, and for the third time in a row, a Kenyan features in the five finalists. The 2002 and 2003 awards were won by Kenyans. The winner of the $15,000 prize will be announced on 19 July, at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Meanwhile, the judges for the UK's most valuable prize for non-fiction, on May 4 announced the shortlist for the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2004. The prize is worth £30,000 to the winner, and £1,000 to each of the six shortlisted authors. 

The shortlist for the Caine Prize comprises: Doreen Baingana (Uganda) for Hunger from the Sun Magazine, March 2003; Brian Chikwava (Zimbabwe) for the Seventh Street Alchemy from Writing Still, Weaver Press 2003; Parselelo Kantai (Kenya) for The Story of Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Band from Kwani?, Nairobi 2004; Monica Arac de Nyeko (Uganda) for Strange Fruit from Cook Communication, online magazine AuthorMe; and Chika Unigwe (Nigeria) for The Secret from online literature magazine Open Wide.

"It was a varied and exciting year, and I think we have a shortlist that reflects these qualities, said Alvaro Ribeiro, the chair of this year’s panel of judges. 

Mr Ribeiro, who was also a judge for the first Caine Prize in 2000, is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare, and the Eighteenth Century. The other judges are Kenyan playwright Biyi Bandele, Bernice Rubens, Anna Umbima, broadcaster and journalist; and Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Senior Lecturer in African Literature, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. 

Last year’s prize was awarded to Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor from Kenya, for Weight of Whispers from Kwani?, a literary magazine published from Nairobi. Yvonne is currently the executive director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival and has been named Woman of the Year by Eve Magazine in Nairobi. Kenyan playwright and journalist, Binyavanga Wainaina won the prize in 2002 for Discovering Home, from G21Net (2001). Wainaina has since gone on to establish Kwani?, Kenya’s only literary magazine, from which both Yvonne’s story and one of this year’s shortlisted stories were chosen.

The 2004 BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist comprises: Anne Applebaum for Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, published by Allen Lane/Penguin; Jonathan Bate for John Clare: A Biography, published by Picador; Bill Bryson for A Short History of Nearly Everything, published by Doubleday; Anna Funder for Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, published by Granta; Aidan Hartley for The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War published by HarperCollins and Tom Holland for Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, published by Little, Brown.

Michael Wood, the chair of the selection committee said, "All of us on the panel were delighted – and genuinely excited – by the final six books in the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize 2004. They seem to me to encapsulate the best in current British non-fiction, but with a strong international flavour too. They include powerful and moving grand sweep history, a wonderful literary biography, and a tour de force of popular science; but also in the list are what seemed to all of us to be compelling and stylistically innovative adventures in travel and politics in which the narrator's own person comes to the fore in a bold and fresh way."
 

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