Alipao Chikaonda, McAuley and Rollinson shortlisted for Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award

Michelle Alipao Chikaonda, Alicia McAuley and Neil Rollinson have been shortlisted for the Deborah Rogers Foundation (DRF) Writers Award.

Alipao Chikaonda’s collection of essays The Dying Embers of Our Setting Sun is up against McAuley’s short stories The Caul and Rollinson’s novel The Dead Don’t Bleed. The winner will be announced on Thursday 9th November and receive £10,000. The two runners-up each receive £1,000.

This year’s judging panel is made up of Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, Claire Adam, the award-winning Trinidadian novelist behind Golden Child (Faber & Faber), and Annalena McAfee, the writer and journalist who founded the Guardian Review.

The winner of the 2021 DRF Writers Award was Mathelinda Nabugodi for The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, a work of non-fiction to be published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Knopf in the US in 2024.