Zimbabwean writer Frank Thabani SAYI has won the 2026 Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Christopher Bland Prize for his memoir, No Safer Kinder Hatred.
The memoir tells the story of a childhood conditioned in the shadow of the mayhem brought about by the structure and dehumanising effects of colonialism, its dreadful legacy, and the impact of civil war. Yet it is full of moving, hilarious, and beautiful stories of innocence, the increasingly hard-won experience of a war-torn childhood, and the development of a man determined to leave this violence behind.
Reacting to the win, SAYI said:
“It’s validation that all stories need to be heard, that our pain doesn’t recede with age. That all we need is for others to listen. I think it’s emboldened me in a way that I never felt would happen.”
Chair of judges A.L. Kennedy described No Safer Kinder Hatred as:
“not just meeting the writer, it’s meeting something deep within you that’s courageous and extraordinary and true. Reading something terribly hard when you’ve got the company of brilliant writing [means] when you start the book, you’re one person, and when you finish the book, you’re a different person. You’ve had that company, you’ve had that insight, and you’re less alone.”
Sayi was selected from a six-book shortlist that included Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above a Shop, Budgie’s The Absence, Sarah Mellor’s The Departed, Joanna Miller’s The Eights, and Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul.
Frank Thabani Sayi was born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the late 1960s, on the cusp of the war of independence or The Bush War, to overturn a century of racial subjugation. After Zimbabwe’s independence from White Rule, he bore witness to and survived the Gukurahundi Massacres orchestrated by Robert Mugabe’s militias in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.
He came to England on a scholarship and has previously worked as a nurse in cardiothoracic medicine, intensive care, and gender reassignment surgery. And for twenty-five years as a Police Officer in Child Sexual Exploitation, Black-on-Black Violence, and Modern Slavery and Child Criminal Exploitation. And most recently, as a lecturer at the Open University’s Law and Business Faculty. He holds a Doctorate in English and Humanities and a Master’s in Cultural and Critical Studies, both from Birkbeck, University of London.
Frank is also an associate editor on the Brief Encounters Journal at SOAS. His first short story, ‘Shadows,’ was published in the Mechanics Institute Review in 2015.
Congratulations, Frank Thabani SAYI!
