New Writing from Nairobi: Storymoja’s “Story of the Week”

This week's winner, Clifford Olouch

By Edward Nawotka

Storymoja, the Nairobi-based publishing collective that we profiled last year, is running a weekly short story contest. Publishers looking for new African voices might do well by paying attention to some of the winners.

Stories that qualify for the contest need to adhere to certain criteria:

• Contemporary Nairobi setting
• Has two or more young professionals as main characters
• Can be either Crime/Detective Fiction, Romance or Life Crisis Fiction
• Must be complete enough to stand as a story by itself
• Has a running mystery; story must be short but the mystery should make it possible to develop the story into a novella (10000 words)
• Should not be more than 2,000 words

The winners get “expedited review” for consideration to be published in book form by Storymoja. You can read more about the winner and read each week’s winning story here.