Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction: Shipikisha by Mubanga Kalimamukwento. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Farah Ali (The River, The Town), Chika Unigwe (The Middle Daughter), and Sarah Yahm (Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction.
Set in Zambia, Shipikisha tells the story of Sali, a working mother of three on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. She allegedly shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. Through a braided narrative woven both before and during the trial, Sali navigates her husband’s infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, her postnatal depression, raising her teenage daughter Ntashé, and an attempted abortion in silence. Until the day her marriage finally fails to endure—shipikisha, considered the ultimate dereliction of wifely duty in Zambia. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face.
Ali says of the manuscript, “Shipikisha is electric. From the very first page, I was pulled into the worlds of Ntashé and her mother, Sali. This is a book where the passages, full of beautifully spare, sharp words, serve the story of relationships put to severe tests.”
Yahm adds, “Kalimamukwento creates an unflinching account of the myriad forms of intimate violence and betrayal within a patriarchal system, interspersed with moments of startling tenderness. She rejects moral certitude, instead pulling us into the minds of messy, complex women attempting to survive and connect in an unjust world.”
Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney, editor and writer. She is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana), unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press), Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer Books). She is the founding editor of Ubwali Literary Magazine, a current Miles Morland Scholar, and a PhD student and Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She featured in the JAY Lit Interview Series in July 2024.
Kalimamukwento said of winning the prize: “Shipikisha has long been a haunting, and its birthing was long and difficult, but now, standing on the other side, I am glad to say, it was worth it. Thank you to the judges for seeing and loving the women in this book as much as I do, and thank you to Dzanc Books for giving this book a home. I am honoured.”
Publication is planned for March 2026.
Congratulations, Kalimamukwento!
