Award Date: 2021
Nigerian writer Enyeribe Ibegwam won the 2021 Chautauqua Janus Prize for his short story “After School Hours,” which appeared in Transition 131. The guest judge of the prize, Rion Amilcar Scott, called the voice in “After School Hours” hypnotic, one that makes you “almost forget that you are reading a story.” He calls the story “a tale of how innocence becomes lost before we even know we are losing it. In fact, the loss of innocence is itself innocent and the consequences always far outweigh the offense…”
Sony Ton-Aime, Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts at the Chautauqua Institution, praised Ibegwam’s ability to convey the most complex things with simplicity.
“Here, in Ibegwam’s masterful prose, a nod or the simple gesture of pointing at someone can signify class dynamism, or the distance between the immigrant parent and her child,” Ton-Aime said, describing ‘After School Hours’ as a story that refuses categorization. “It is, on its face, a coming-of-age story, but one like in real life we are only aware of after the fact. It is also the typical “children of immigrant” story, except that its main point is to disprove the belief that there is a typical immigrant story. The same struggles assail us all. “After School Hours” will not only make you cry, laugh, and think, but will linger with you for years.
The Chautauqua Janus Prize is administered by New York-based Chautauqua Institution and annually “celebrates one emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives and readers’ imaginations. Named for Janus, the Roman god who looks to both the past and the future, the prize honors writing with a command of craft that renovates our understandings of both.”
Ibegwam’s work has appeared in PEN America Best Debut Stories 2019, Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review, Auburn Avenue, and The Georgia Review A graduate of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he has received PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for his debut short story and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.