Okwiri Oduor Reveals the Highs and Lows of Winning the Caine Prize
Okwiri Oduor admits there are two sides to winning the Caine Prize, but says the negatives are short-lived and far outweighed by the positives.
Binyavanga Wainaina, who won the Caine Prize in 2002 and went on to set up literary magazine Kwani? to promote new African writing, was at the centre of a controversy this week, after slamming the Caine Prize in an interview with This Is Africa.
Wainaina, who has not been long out of the headlines this year, criticised the prioritisation of the Caine Prize, saying that there are many valuable literary institutions in Africa, such as Saraba, the Farafina workshop, Cassava Republic, that are “vastly underfunded and vastly ungrown, and they are the ones who create the ground that is building these new writers”.
I want people to say, Okwiri, who won the Caine Prize, is the founder of Jalada, an online magazine that has won five prizes in the last year and published, I think, the most exciting fiction I’ve seen in ten years. [...] Okwiri made her name long before the Caine prize. [...] The idea that she won the Caine Prize and journalists now want to feed the fact that she was made by the Caine Prize is unmaking her. You ask any smart Kenyan writer who is in the game, they tell you Okwiri is the new be. And we are talking two years ago. We must lose this s**t. Give due credit but don’t go giving free money and free legitimacy. Because the Caine Prize right now needs your legitimacy to get money. They take press clipping from all Nigerian media and use that to source for funding. We need to focus on how we can grow our own ecosystem.
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In an interview with Book LIVE, which took place a few days before Wainaina’s outburst, Okwiri expressed reservations of a different sort about the prize.
“There’s been lots of interest. Things have been so horrible the past few weeks … I kind of barricaded myself after the win. I couldn’t handle it, I found it so overwhelming, so I kind of shut myself away,” Okwiri admitted.
“In the process, I think I kind of ignored some media inquiries, which I feel slightly bad about but not completely, because a lot of interviewers ask you the same questions and sometimes I feel like just referring them to an interview I did before: ‘Just go online and you will find all the answers’.
“One thing that’s been happening is that I’m being interviewed by someone who maybe didn’t do much research, or is not very interested in the literary arts, or isn’t much or a reader or a writer. It makes the interview much more exhausting than it need be. So I’m ambivalent about interviews.”
However, Okwiri believes the exposure the prize has afforded her is invaluable, and much more important than the prize money or prestige that come with winning the “African Booker”.
“But there’s been lots of positives as well, of course,” she says. “I think the opportunities you get as a result of the prize are the main positive. The money sounds like a lot but when you get down to it it’s surprisingly not much. But the opportunities, like coming to South Africa for the [Mail & Guardian Literary] Festival. Having access to audiences I wouldn’t have had access to on my own. The fact that I’m here talking to you. The fact that someone is reading me who I’ll meet and they’ll tell me ‘Wow, I really enjoyed your story’, and they wouldn’t have read me if it weren’t for this. The fact that in some ways I can apply for residencies or MFA programmes, or whatever I want to, and have more weight on my application. Just, so many opportunities. So many opportunities to meet the readers, to meet other writers.
“Even on the Caine circuit itself, being in London with the other shortlistees, we became friends and I appreciate that.”
The daunting amount of attention Okwiri received after winning the prize, however, does go some way to proving Wainaina’s point. On the strength of writing like “My Father’s Head”, Okwiri deserves recognition. But why does it take a prize awarded in London to shove her into the spotlight?
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