Pilli Dumea, Executive Secretary, Children’s Book Project for Tanzania, Robert Orr, Canadian High Commissioner, and Abdullah Saiwaad, Chair of the Board, Children’s Book Project for Tanzania
Three new outstanding young adult fiction books will be made available to Tanzanian readers thanks to the third round of the Burt Award for African Literature – Tanzania. The award is sponsored by CODE, a Canadian charitable, non-governmental organization that has been working with local partners in developing countries for over 50 years to empower children to learn to read and write.
Winners of the most recent edition of the award were recognized on November 25th, 2011, at a ceremony hosted by CODE’s local partner the Children’s Book Project for Tanzania (CBP) at the National Book Fair in Dar es Salaam, organized by the Book Development Council of Tanzania.
Made possible by the Literary Prizes Foundation, the Burt Award for African Literature is an annual award recognizing excellence in young adult fiction from African countries. Recognizing the progress that countries like Tanzania have made in increasing secondary school enrollments, the Burt Award addresses an ongoing shortage of relevant and high-quality reading materials for young people at this critical stage of learning, while at the same time promoting a love of reading. First introduced in Tanzania in 2008, the award is now also presented in Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana. To date, 15 titles (and over 75,000 copies) have been published through the award.
The first prize for this round went to Tune S. Salim for her novel Close Calls, while the second and third prizes were awarded to Nahida Esmail for Lessilie The City Masai and Juma Mwamgwirani Mwakimatu for The Choice, respectively. Close Calls and Lessilie The City Masai were published by Oxford University Press and The Choice was published by Mkuki Na Nyota. CBP will distribute 9,000 copies to 146 project schools across Tanzania. Publishers will also market a further 2,000 copies of each title locally, for a total of 15,000 new books in print.
For more information about CODE and the Burt Award for African Literature, visit www.codecan.org
Tags: Research & quality, Trends
