Over the past decade, the publishing industry has become risk-averse. The words “genre-defying” and “original” make agents and editors break out in a cold sweat – or so we’re told. The industry is constantly described as conservative. Manuscripts are rejected for being too cerebral, unsellable in a market that wants only apple pie. An alternative publishing model has grown up around writers looking for new routes to readers. However indie publishers are often (unfairly) perceived as exploitative and the work produced by them as subpar.
It is in this climate that Short Story Day Africa was formed and, in the four years since inception, the SSDA team has developed a survival ethos: to subvert and reclaim. Reclaim the place of the short story. Reclaim a space for non-conformist writing. Subvert ideas about what it means to be a writer in Africa. Subvert ideas about what makes a story African.
No surprise then that, when we sent out the call for speculative fiction stories, we asked writers to subvert the idioms of both the genre and our vast continent. We received 116 answers to that call, around thirty up on last year’s entries. The list was whittled down through a blind reading process, but also through careful curatorship. This meant that some of the stories that made it through the reading process, even some that scored highly, did not make it onto the long-list of eighteen. These were well-crafted stories, good stories, but we wanted stories that had interpreted the theme in unexpected ways.
As a result, around a fifth of the voices contained within these pages are being published for the first time. These voices appear alongside established writers, like Diane Awerbuck, who penned “Leatherman,” this year’s winning story. In fact, “In the Water”, the story that took third place, is Kerstin Hall’s first published story. Second place went to Sylvia Schlettwein for “Ape Shit”, with “The Corpse” by Sese Yane getting a special mention. Needless to say, these eighteen are writers who are not afraid to bend rules, genre and language.
The nineteenth story in this collection did not come from the competition entries. “Hands” was written by Tiah Beautement, a member of the SSDA team, in response to a chronic and often debilitating condition she has lived with these past four years. In spite of the physical limitations imposed on Tiah she has never shied away from the challenges of co-running Short Story Day Africa.
In Terra Incognita, Short Story Day Africa is proud to present nineteen stories of speculative fiction. Contained within these pages are stories that explore, among other things, the sexual magnetism of a tokoloshe, a deadly feud with a troop of baboons, a journey through colonial purgatory, along with ghosts, re-imagined folklore, and the fear of that which lies beneath both land and water.
Terra Incognita. Uncharted depths. Africa unknowable.
Rachel Zadok
Short Story Day Africa