In the 2nd of May via a Facebook post, Bernardine Evaristo, the founder of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, announced Zibusiso Mpofu as the tenth and final recipient of the prize for 2022, while the judges – Gabeba Baderoon (Chair), Tjawangwa Demi and Tsitsi Jaji – also decided on an Honourable Mention for Asmaa Jama (Somalia).

According to the article on the website, the judges describe Mpofu’s poetry as: ‘allusive, lyrical’ among others.

The judges praised the shortlisted poems, saying: ‘it is fitting that after a decade of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, we find here African voices liberated from prescriptions of form and ideas. Engaging an expansive range of themes, from familial intimacy to the body to history’s lingering arc, this was a richly varied selection marked by confident experimentation with formal strategies – from disciplined patterns to playful uses of spacing, typography, punctuation and more. In the poems, we are ferried from a near empty stadium where Marvin Gaye sings to the moon and a cleaning crew to ‘bilaal [who] was the only black man Allah loved’ to a party in northwest China to rooms ‘peopled by cardiac monitors and /bespectacled cardiologists’. Many strike a deeply melancholic note, and even a sense of mourning. But they are alive to the currents of history and the way poetry’s memorial practices animate the raw intimacy between the seen and unseen. The poems offered rich grounds from which to form our shortlist.’

The shortlisted poets are: Conor Cogill (South Africa), Asmaa Jama (Somalia), Edil Hassan (Somalia), Fahad Al-Amoudi (Ethiopia), Adedayo Agarau (Nigeria), and Chisom Okafor (Nigeria).

This is the last of Brunel African Poetry Prize, as it has been renamed the Evaristo African Poetry Prize. The contest will open for submissions in October 2022.

Congratulations, Zibusiso Mpofu!