2021 Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards: Conversations with Shortlisted Fiction Writers
2021 BANK WINDHOEK DOEK LITERARY AWARDS
CONVERSATIONS WITH SHORTLISTED FICTION WRITERS
As part of Africa in Dialogue’s 2020 Filmmaker Series, Namibian writer, filmmaker, and publishing professional Mutaleni Nadimi spoke of how being part of “a collective with a group of writers who spent time writing short stories, sharing, critiquing and improving them” sustained and encouraged her:
“So I was very excited when we thought, okay, let’s create a platform, so we started a free online literary magazine called Doek!”
Doek!, Namibia’s first and only literary magazine, was founded in 2019; it is produced in Windhoek, and publishes short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art from Namibia, Africa, and the African diaspora.
During this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize Series, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Doek!, Rémy Ngamije, hinted at what it’s like to be an artministrator of Doek, an independent arts organisation supporting the literary arts in Namibia.
The inaugural Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards were established in partnership with Bank Windhoek “as part of Doek’s ongoing mission to grow a diverse, curious, and robust literary culture” within Namibia.
We are excited about the opportunity to celebrate the power of writing collectives and arts organizations, and to engage the shortlisted writers, poets, and visual artists in discussions about their work.
Conversations with the writers shortlisted for the fiction category of the 2021 Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards will be shared here, at Africa in Dialogue, a day at a time, from the 11th to the 13th of November 2021.
Below are the names of the shortlisted writers, and the titles of the shortlisted stories:
Filemon Iiyambo – December
Dalene Kooper – The Letter
Ndawedwa Denga Hanghuwo – Silhouette
Read the shortlisted stories, and more about the Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards, here. The longlist is available here.
Davina was born in a university teaching hospital in Lusaka and raised on the grounds of Uganda’s oldest university in Kampala (from where she would later receive a BSc in Botany and Zoology and a PGDE in biological sciences). Her MSc (Zoology) research assessed the abundance and richness of forest-dependent birds in two tropical lowland rainforest fragments in central Uganda.
She writes poetry and short fiction for children and adults. Her short stories, Of Birds and Bees and Touch Me Not, were shortlisted for the 2018 Short Story Day Africa Prize and the 2020 Afritondo Short Story Prize respectively.
She’s interested in the intersection between literature and science, will read anything with an arresting title, and writes about topics that interest her.
She’s writing her first novel, The Other Side of Day.
