Meron Hadero has become the first Ethiopian to win the AKO Cain Prize Award.
In a virtual ceremony held on Monday, July 26, the Ethiopian-American author was announced as winner of the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story ‘The Street Sweep’, published in ZYZZYVA (2018), walking away with $13,000.
We are delighted to announce that Ethiopian-American writer Meron Hadero has been awarded the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story ‘The Street Sweep’, published in ZYZZYVA (2018). This is the first time an Ethiopian writer has won since the Prize’s inception in 2000.
Reacting to the thrilling news, Meron told the BBC she was shocked’.
“I’m absolutely thrilled, I’m in shock being shortlisted in itself was a huge honor” she said.
Her winning short story is about an Ethiopian boy called Getu, who has to navigate the fraught power dynamics of NGOs and foreign aid in Addis Ababa.
It impressed the judges who found it “utterly without self-pity” and said it “turns the lens” on the usual clichés.
Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the U.S. via Germany as a young child. She is the winner of the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing and published in Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, Addis Ababa Noir, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Best American Short Stories, among others. Her writing has also been in The New York Times Book Review, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and will appear in the forthcoming anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us.
A 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, she’s been a fellow at Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, and her writing has been supported by the International Institute at the University of Michigan, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Artist Trust.
Meron is an alum of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where she worked as a research analyst for the President of Global Development, and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale, and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American Studies.
The AKO Caine Prize for African Writing is a literature prize awarded to an African writer of a short story published in English. The prize was launched in 2000 to encourage and highlight the richness and diversity of African writing by bringing it to a wider audience internationally.
