UT Professor Named to Shortlist for Caine Prize

Arthur Onipede Hollist, associate professor of English at The University of Tampa, was recently named to the shortlist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, arguably Africa’s most prestigious literary prize. The shortlist — comprised of five finalists — was selected from 96 entries from 16 African countries.

Hollist’s entry, “Foreign Aid,” was originally published in the Journal of Progressive Human Services Vol. 23.3, a special issue devoted to Africa. The short story is available to read online and has been published with the stories of the other finalists in the anthology A Memory This Size and Other Stories by New Internationalist and seven co-publishers in Africa.

On July 8, Nigeria’s Tope Folarin was named the winner of the 2013 Caine Prize for his short story “Miracle” from Transition, Issue 109.

The Caine Prize is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former chairman of Booker Group, the UK’s leading food wholesaler, and chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. The £10,000 prize is awarded for a short story published in English by a writer who was born in Africa. Hollist is a native of Sierra Leone.

His interests cover the literature of the African imagination. So the Path Does not Die (Langaa Press, 2012, Cameroon) is his first novel. Eldred Durosimi Jones, a Sierra Leonean academic and noted literary critic, describes Hollist as “very gifted” and having a “great facility with words.” The novel, which Jones refers to as a blockbuster, starts in the provinces of Sierra Leone, moves to capital city Freetown, which it looks at in considerable depth, and later deals with the fortunes of the protagonist in the U.S.

For more information, contact Hollist at ohollist@ut.edu.