The Pontas Agency is celebrating that Minnesota-based Zambian writer and poet Mubanga Kalimamukwento's second novel Shipikisha is the winner of the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction and will be published by Dzanc Books in March 2026! French rights have been pre-empted by Editions de L’Aube. English language rights (excl. North America), translation rights (excl. French) and film/TV rights are currently available.
Set in Zambia, Shipikisha tells the story of Sali, a working mother of three on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. She allegedly shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. Through a braided narrative woven both before and during the trial, Sali navigates her husband’s infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, her postnatal depression, raising her teenage daughter Ntashé, and an attempted abortion in silence. Until the day her marriage finally fails to endure—shipikisha, considered the ultimate dereliction of wifely duty in Zambia. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face.
It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors, including Sarah Yahm (Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation), winner of the 2023 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. They said:
“Shipikisha is electric. From the very first page I was pulled into the worlds of Ntashé and her mother. This is a book where the passages, full of beautifully spare, sharp words, are there to serve the story of relationships put to severe tests.” Farah Ali, author of The River, The Town
“In Shipikisha, Kalimamukwento creates an unflinching account of the myriad forms of intimate violence and betrayal within a patriarchal system, interspersed with moments of startling tenderness. She rejects moral certitude, instead pulling us into the minds of messy, complex women attempting to survive and connect in an unjust world…” Sarah Yahm, author of Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
Mubanga Kalimamukwento (1988) is a Zambian storyteller and criminal lawyer with an MFA from Hamline University, where she received the Writer of Color Merit Scholarship and the Deborah Keenan Poetry Scholarship. In 2024, she was the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Angie Cruz, for her short story collection Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press). Her debut novel The Mourning Bird (Jacana Media) won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award in 2019 and was listed among the 15 most notable books of 2019 by Brittle Paper. Mubanga was also the winner of the Kalemba Short Story Prize in 2019 for her short story “Inswa,” and the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest in 2022 for her work unmarked graves. Her short fiction and poetry have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAP) Book Prize, the Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Nobrow Short Story Prize, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, The Red Rock Review, The Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and on Netflix among others.
For more information about the above title, please contact Carla Briner (carla@pontas-agency.com).