Kenyan writer Idza Luhumyo won the £10,000 (about $11,830) AKO Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "Five Years Next Sunday," which was published in Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa and won the Short Story Day Africa Prize. She is the fifth Kenyan writer to win the Caine Prize after Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Yvonne Owuor (2003), Okwiri Oduor (2014) and Makena Onjerika (2018).
Chair of judges Okey Ndibe said: "What we liked about the story was the mystical office of the protagonist, who is both ostracized and yet holds the fate of her community in her hair. She is stripped of agency by her immediate family, as well as the Europeans who give the impression of placing her on a pedestal, yet within that seeming absence of agency, and oppressive world, is her stubborn reclamation of herself. The dramatic tension in the story is so powerful and palpable that it's like something you could cut with a knife."