Adesokan’s ‘South Side’ Wins Parrésia Press the CANEX Prize for Publishing 2026

Nigerian publishing house Parrésia Publishers has won the $20,000 CANEX Prize for Publishing 2026 at the recently concluded Creative Africa Nexus Weekend (CANEX WKND 2026) in Lagos. 

The honour went to South Side, a novel by Professor Akin Adesokan, from the publishers founded by Azafi Omoluabi and Richard Ali.

The publisher announced South Side in May 2025, ending the long wait for Adesokan’s fiction, more than two decades after his first published novel. Adesokan is a Professor of Comparative Literature and of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and his first novel, Roots in the Sky, won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Fiction in manuscript form in 1996. 

Reviewers have read South Side as a novel about identity, displacement and the search for belonging. 

Omoluabi and Ali founded Parrésia in 2012 to sell books to Nigerian readers and to promote the freedom of the imagination and the free press. Its list includes Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, published in 2015, which went on to win the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2016.

The other shortlisted titles in this year’s edition were by Naa-Adei Kotey, Chitra Nagarajan, Bento Baloi and Lee Johnson. The publishers included Masobe Books, Cassava Republic Press and Editora Trinta Zero Nove. Each of the other finalists receives $2,000.

Past winners

Cassava Republic Press, a Nigeria-based house, won the inaugural prize in October 2024 for Female Fear Factory: Unravelling Patriarchy’s Cultures of Violence by the South African author Pumla Dineo Gqola. 

Editor Layla Mohamed collected the $20,000 in Algiers, where the first jury comprised Wale Okediran of Nigeria, Renée Edwige Dro of Côte d’Ivoire and Ashraf Aboul-Yazid of Egypt.

The award then crossed to South Africa in 2025. Cape Town’s independent Karavan Press won for Thobeka Yose’s In Silence My Heart Speaks, also in Algiers, at the Intra-African Trade Fair. That edition drew more than 80 submissions and was judged by Dr Boukenna Abdelaziz, Lavaille Lavette and Professor Egara Kabaji.

For 2026 the prize widened its reach. It dropped “in Africa” from its name and opened eligibility to publishers from Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states. 

The jury was announced in August, chaired by the Nigerian author and academic Professor Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, alongside the South African literary scholar Professor Polo Moji and the Kenyan poet and broadcaster Khainga O’Okwemba.

The CANEX Prize is part of Afreximbank’s CANEX Book Factory, which also includes a creative writing workshop for emerging writers and the CANEX Book Fair. Judging covers editorial quality, book design and production, innovation, distribution and cultural impact. The prize rewards the publisher’s whole craft, not only the manuscript.