We are so excited to announce that current MFA student Richard Prins has just been awarded an NEA fellowship, which will be the first the National Endowment for the Arts has ever granted in Swahili-English translation.

The fellowship will be to support the translation from the Swahili of the novel Walenisi by Kenyan writer Katama Mkangi. Walenisi is an allegorical narrative that reinterprets historical events in Kenya during the Kenyatta and Moi regimes. It opens with the protagonist, Dzombo, who is sentenced to death for “talking too much” in a dystopian society where public executions involve shoving the guilty parties inside a rocket and blasting them into space. Instead of exploding like those executed before him, Dzombo miraculously pilots the vessel through an asteroid belt of allegorical maladies.

Congratulations, Richard!!!

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