A Nigerian publisher has brought one of the continent’s biggest publishing prizes back home. Parrésia Publishers, founded by Azafi Omoluabi and Richard Ali, has won the $20,000 CANEX Prize for Publishing for South Side, a novel by Professor Akin Adesokan.
The award is in its third edition and was announced Friday evening during Creative Africa Nexus Weekend (CANEX WKND 2026), which is under way at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts, Iganmu, Lagos.
The win lands in a city that has spent three days talking about who owns African stories and who profits from them. For a Nigerian house to take the prize in Lagos, as the gathering turns to intellectual property and distribution, is a fitting piece of timing.
The CANEX Prize is unusual in whom it honours. It 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.
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, with a longlist and shortlist to follow. It was 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 prize has so far moved between Nigeria and South Africa, and this year’s result closes the loop.
The first winner, in October 2024, was the Nigeria-based Cassava Republic Press, for Female Fear Factory: Unravelling Patriarchy’s Cultures of Violence by the South African author Pumla Dineo Gqola. The award was announced in Algiers, and Layla Mohamed, an editor at Cassava Republic, collected the $20,000. That first jury comprised Wale Okediran of Nigeria, Renée Edwige Dro of Côte d’Ivoire and Ashraf Aboul-Yazid of Egypt.
In 2025 the prize went to Karavan Press, an independent publisher in Cape Town, for Thobeka Yose’s In Silence My Heart Speaks, at the Intra-African Trade Fair in Algiers. That second edition drew more than 80 submissions. The jury was Dr Boukenna Abdelaziz, Lavaille Lavette and Professor Egara Kabaji.
The prize began with a Nigerian house, crossed to South Africa, and has now returned to Nigeria.
Parrésia is among Nigeria’s more adventurous independent presses. Omoluabi and Ali founded it 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.
South Side is a long-delayed arrival. The publisher announced it for May 2025, and the wait for Adesokan’s fiction was 21 years 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. That is a fitting subject for a prize built around the idea of “Global Africa”.
South Side was one of five shortlisted titles, by Adesokan, 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.
CANEX WKND 2026 has been built around finance and ownership, and the publishing prize sits comfortably within it. The four-day event runs from November 5 to 8 under the theme “One People, United in Culture, Creating for the World.” Literature and publishing feature through the CANEX Book Factory, the Book Fair, writers’ workshops, manuscript pitching and the prize itself.
The opening was heavy with officials. Vice President Kashim Shettima declared the event open and urged African governments to remove trade barriers so creative products can circulate freely. He told creatives not to leave Lagos with memories alone but with “a buyer’s handshake”. The ceremony also featured Afreximbank President George Elombi, AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene, Industry, Trade and Investment Minister Olajumoke Oduwole and Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism, and the Creative Economy Hannatu Musa Musawa alongside ministers of culture and creative industries from 11 African countries. Elombi said Africa earns about $60 billion from its creative industries but holds only two per cent of the global market. Much of the value, he said, is kept elsewhere because rights are owned elsewhere.
The cultural line-up has been equally prominent. Participants include Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, the actor Uzo Aduba, the filmmaker Funke Akindele, the actors Richard Mofe-Damijo and Thuso Mbedu, and the former footballers Didier Drogba and Austin “Jay-Jay” Okocha. Soyinka has spoken on a panel on building a creative economy in Global Africa and appeared in a session marking 20 years of his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn. The former Afreximbank President, Professor Benedict Oramah, featured on Friday evening in a question and answer session after the screening of the documentary, ‘THE LION SPEAKS: The Rise of Global Africa’ where he argued that the main challenge facing the continent is to reverse the systems that have long constrained its progress and restore Africans’ control over their resources and destiny.
Drogba and Okocha are scheduled for “When Giants Speak: The Business of the Game”.
The business side has moved quickly. Kanayo Awani, Afreximbank’s Executive Vice President for Intra-African Trade and Export Development, told journalists she expects at least $1 billion in deals by the end of the event. By way of comparison, she said, the previous edition in Algiers produced deals worth about $540 million, and two cooperative agreements of about $100 million were signed on Thursday. Afreximbank has raised its commitment to the creative sector to $2 billion. Publishers will be hoping some of that money finds its way to books.
The programme turned to its busiest stretch on Saturday with Obi Asika, Director-General of the National Council for Arts and Culture, speaking at the Nigerian International Film & TV Summit, Africa Jollof Wars, a cooking contest in which Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cameroon compete, and the main CANEX WKND concert.
The concert features Davido, Fally Ipupa, Flavour, Libianca and Charlotte Dipanda.
Also, among several other activities, a live demonstration on scaling Africa’s fast food industry, titled “From Suya to Kota”.
Sunday is the closing day. It brings cultural excursions, gastronomy activities and the CANEX Music Factory Songwriting Camp. The weekend ends with a Legends Football Match at Onikan Stadium.
Parrésia’s win is a small story set inside a very large one. A summit anchored on $2 billion and billion-dollar deal targets has also made room to say that books are intellectual property too, and that the people who edit, design, print and distribute them deserve recognition. For Omoluabi, Ali and Adesokan, the prize gives a long-gestating novel and a fourteen-year-old independent press a national and continental platform.
CANEX WKND 2026, organised by Afreximbank and hosted by the Federal Government of Nigeria, focuses this year on finance, ownership, intellectual property and market access for Africa’s creative and cultural industries.