(GIN) - Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry has won this year's Caine Prize for African Writing, for his story “Stickfighting Days” of life and death in a city rubbish dump.
 
The Caine Prize of $16,000 is regarded as Africa's leading literary award for a short story published in English by an African writer. Judges called Terry a “talent with an enormous future.”
 
Three of the five judges are Africans, but this is a prize decided in England, awarded in Oxford for work written in English, noted editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey in the Guardian newspaper. “There are no stories translated from French or Arabic. And what about Shona, Twi, Hausa, Chewa, Lingala, Swahili or Afrikaans?”
 
Born in Sierra Leone, Terry grew up in Nigeria, the U.K, and Cote d'Ivoire before attending university in New York. Subsequently, Olufemi lived in Kenya and worked as a journalist and analyst in Somalia and Uganda. He lives in Cape Town where he is writing his first novel.
 
He also wins a month-long writers residency at Georgetown University, Washington DC.