2025 Ubwali Hope Prize: Conversations with Shortlisted Writers

It is winter in South Africa and if you want to know what is keeping me warm, the answer is right here. Words. Stories and conversations. Anecdotes and epiphanies. 

I am knee-deep in six amazing interviews with the writers shortlisted for the 2025 Ubwali Hope Prize. I will be sharing these dialogues here at Africa in Dialogue, from the 10th to the 27th of June 2025, as we anticipate the announcement of the winner and runners-up in July 2025.

I would like to express my gratitude to Mubanga Kalimamukwento, the founder of Ubwali, for inviting me to curate this series and for her assistance during every stage of the process. She connected me with the six writers and shared their shortlisted poems, essays and short stories.

When I began my conversations with the writers, I remembered what brought me to my understanding of the literary interview as an art form six years ago: the opportunity to co-create a new narrative through the exploration of literature.

Through dialogue, we explore what exists in the work we are reading and writing, but also what could have existed in alternate versions of the work, or what would happen if the last line was not the end of the story but just the closing of one chapter.

I have always strived to curate the type of conversations that make readers feel how I have felt whenever I read or listened to a good interview: as if I was right there in the room, notebook in hand, facing my favourite writer, eager to voice a burning question about their work.

I am truly looking forward to sharing these six conversations with you, one at a time, every Tuesday and Friday, from the 10th to the 27th of June 2025.

Linked below are the writers’ shortlisted pieces for you to enjoy as we await the interview series: 

“Thoughtlets on Immersion” by Suwilanji Namusamba (CNF)

“A 2019 Survey on How People Imagine Themselves Dying” by Isaac Kanyinji (Poetry)

“A Time to Ask” Mwila Agatha Zaza (Fiction)

“Conditioned Roots” by Mwanabibi Sikamo (CNF)

“When you died” by Dacious Kasoka (Poetry)

“Hometown Glory” by Mwinji Siame (Fiction)

Read more about the 2025 Ubwali Hope Prize shortlisted writers here.