Nigerian Author Tope Folarin Wins Caines Prize For Story With Christian Theme ‘Miracle’

Tope Folarin is based in the United States. He is the first African writer in the diaspora to win the Caines Prize

Nigerian author  Tope Folarin was named Monday night as the 2013 winner of the Caines Prize for African Writing for his story entitled ‘Miracle’.


The Chair of Judges, Gus Casely-Hayford, announced Tope Folarin as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday, 8 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
‘Miracle’ is a story set in Texas in an evangelical Nigerian church where the congregation has gathered to witness the healing powers of a blind pastor-prophet. Religion and the gullibility of those caught in the deceit that sometimes comes with faith rise to the surface as a young boy volunteers to be healed and begins to believe in miracles.

According to a press release from The Cainnes Prize, Tope Folarin is the recipient of writing fellowships from the Institute for Policy Studies and Callaloo, and he serves on the board of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Tope was educated at Morehouse College, and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. He lives and works in Washington, DC.

In an interview with BBC’s Focus on Africa Programme on Tuesday evening, Tope Folarin said he had grown up in Pentecostal churches and that’s where the idea for the story came.

As winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize, Tope will be given the opportunity to take up a  month’s residence at Georgetown University, as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center  for Poetics and Social Practice and will be invited to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September.

The Caine Prize, awarded annually for African creative writing, is named after the late Sir
Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prizemanagement committee for nearly 25 years. The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3,000 to 10,000 words). An “African writer” is normally taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African.

The African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, are Patrons of The Caine Prize.