Ugandan author Otoniya J. Okot Bitek has been longlisted for this 12 months’s version of the Giller Prize.
Her manuscript, We, the Kindling, is considered one of fourteen titles that had been chosen from a subject of greater than 100 books submitted by publishers throughout Canada.
Commenting on the longlist, the Jury said: “These works illuminate the on a regular basis and the otherworldly, contemplating what it means to be human in these humorous, unhappy, joyful, and complex occasions…they uncover surprising communities and friendships, rendering with precision and sweetness the anxieties and heartaches tethered to life and dying. These texts reveal how we’re an interconnected, international neighborhood, nonetheless cacophonous our collective cries. The facility of the voices on this 12 months’s longlist astonished the judges. These authors urgently compel readers to be transported, to be lifted up, and finally, to like.”
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek, born in Kenya to Ugandan mother and father, writes poetry and fiction. Her first assortment, 100 Days, gained the 2017 IndieFab Guide of the Yr Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second assortment, A is for Acholi, gained the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most up-to-date assortment of poetry, Tune & Dread, is printed by Talonbooks. Her quick story “Going House” obtained a particular point out within the 2004 Commonwealth Quick Fiction Prize.
Her first novel, We, the Kindling, follows Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three mates who, years in the past after they had been faculty youngsters, survived seize by the Lord’s Resistance Military in northern Uganda. Now, as the ladies go about their new lives within the metropolis, purchasing, caring for his or her youngsters, planning and desirous about what the long run would possibly maintain, we come to know how deeply their previous haunts the current. In sleek but unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid people tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life earlier than the conflict that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the horrible occasions that led to abductions of youngsters from supposedly secure colleges, and tracing perilous journeys dwelling once more.
Dealing with limitless treks throughout the ravaged countryside and thru slim mountain passes, gun battles and fixed brutality, many women didn’t survive. Those that did make it again dwelling, some carrying babies of their very own, bore the unstated weight of their experiences inside households and communities that always wished to neglect and transfer on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to show away or to spectacularise tragedy, shaping a refrain of girls’s voices right into a hauntingly stunning novel, suffused with care and humanity.
Based by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994, the Giller Prize is Canada’s main and most influential literary prize for fiction. It awards $100,000 yearly to the creator of the perfect Canadian novel, graphic novel or quick story assortment printed in English, and $10,000 to every of the finalists. The award is known as in honour of Jack Rabinovitch’s spouse, the late literary journalist, Doris Giller.
The Giller Prize shortlist will probably be introduced on Monday sixth October 2025. This 12 months’s winner will probably be introduced on Monday seventeenth November 2025.