Short Story Day Africa is a small organisation with limited funding and manpower. As such, we ask writers to take heed of our terms and conditions of entry as we prefer not to have to read and debate stories that will later need to be disqualified.
One rule described under the submission criteria for the annual anthology on the SSDA website is that no simultaneous submissions are allowed, and any story found to have been entered for publication or a prize elsewhere will automatically be disqualified. This rule is in place to protect publication rights for SSDA and our publishing partners. For this reason, regretfully, we have had to disqualify David Medalie’s “Borrowed by the Wind”, which was simultaneously entered for the SSDA and Gerald Kraak awards; and Hanna Ali's "Bloated", which was entered into the 2017 HISSAC competition and took third place. While we congratulate both authors, and are glad that "Borrowed by the Wind" will see print, as it is a fine story, we are saddened that neither will be published in the next SSDA anthology. David Medalie has apologised sincerely for his oversight. We would like to urge writers to please, please read the SSDA Prize rules carefully before hitting “send”.
The places of these two stories on the longlist will be taken by “The Things They Said” by Susan Newham-Blake and “The Memory Games” by Mpho Phalwane. Congratulations to Susan and Mpho!
The full updated longlist can be viewed here.