Short Story Day Africa presents the cover of Water: New Short Fiction from Africa.
Nick Mulgrew – the designer – had this to say:
“When asked to put together the cover for Water, I was paralysed at first by the amount of interpretations of the theme that there could be. But then I turned that around: I thought a collage of as many different images and representations of water I could find would work well. I sourced water-related images from my own library, as well as that of my co-editor Karina Szczurek, and interspersed them with open-licenced images. To create the wave pattern I used kids’ wavy scissors to cut out the images and literally stuck them together. The result is a bringing together of dozens of visual interpretations of the theme into a coherent cover image.”
Water: New Short Fiction From Africa, edited by Nick Mulgrew and Karina Szczurek, will be released worldwide on 1 January 2016 in partnership with Hands On Books, Cassava Republic and New Internationalist.
The winners, selected form the shortlist, will be announced at the Aké Arts and Book Festival in Abeokuta, Nigeria later this month. The grand prize winner is set to win R10 000. Rachel Zadok, the project's founder, and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, one of this year's judges, will make the announcement at lunchtime on Saturday 20 November before the launch of Jalada Africa's The Language Issue.
Both of SSDA’s previous anthologies have received critical acclaim. Two stories from Feast, Famine & Potluck were shortlisted for The Caine Prize for African Writing in 2014; “My Father's Head” by Okwiri Oduor went on to win the prize. Terra Incognita has received wide critical praise, including an excellent review from the L.A. Review of Books.