Kenyan wins African writing prize

Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina won for Discovering Home, a short story first published on the web site G21Net, The World Magazine.

In a dinner at Oxford's Bodleian Museum, chair of the judges Dr Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian born author of the Booker-nominated The Map of Love, said: "It is an accomplished and subtly imagined story.

"It shifts between different African locations with wit, wisdom and originality. It is a brilliant augur of future work by this author."

Wainaina has been a food and travel writer for some years and writes for a number of South African newspapers.

Binyavanga cites his aunt, the novelist Rebecca Njauwrote, whose work was published by Heinemann's African Writers Series in the 1960s, as a major inspiration.

A number of his short stories have been published, including An Affair to Dismember, and his novel Flights of My Fancy is likely to be published in 2003.

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He is acknowledged as an expert on African cuisine and has collected 13,000 recipes as well as running a catering and food consultancy.

The award was founded in memory of the late Sir Michael Caine, former chairman of food wholesaler Booker, which originally sponsored the Booker Prize and has close links with Africa.

The $15,000 (£9,800) prize goes to work by an African writer published in English, whether published in Africa or elsewhere. The aim of the prize is to bring African writing to a wider audience.

Rest of the shortlist
Amanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigeria
Florent Couoa-Zotti, Benin
Allan Kolski Horwitz, South Africa
Rory Kilalea, Zimbabwe

Among this year's judges were journalist and critic Jason Cowley, currently literary editor of The New Statesman, and author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose novel Paradise was shortlisted for both the Whitbread and Booker prizes in 1994.

Last year's award went to Nigerian writer and Helon Habila for Love Poems, the story of a poet detained under military rule in Nigeria.