PREE is delighted to announce the winners of our 2024 Fertile Ground writing competition held in collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund (PCF). As part of our agreement with the PCF on receiving one of their Fertile Ground grants, PREE was to involve at least five of their 100 seed awardees in our activities (each year the PCF awards 100 young people living in the Global South €5000 each).

Accordingly late last year we designed a writing competition for the 2023 and 2024 seed awardees who were invited to respond to one of three open-ended prompts:

  • In 2024, the world’s complexities made me wish for…
  • In 2024, we sensed that…
  • In 2024, the most challenging issue facing us was…‎

Entries could be in any one of the following genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, experimental writing, video and audio works and visual art. By the end of October, we had received 24 responses. The standard of submissions from PCF’s seed awardees was exceptionally high and it was tough for judges Norval Edwards, Kim Williams-Pulfer and Annie Paul to narrow it down to just four winners.

Millan Tarus of Kenya won first prize for his essay Eternal Unrest (USD2000); Ömer Tevfik Erten from Türkiye, won second prize for Line and Beyond (USD1500) and the third place was a tie between Shoty Ndjoli of the Democratic Republic of Congo for his poem Bite the Bitter and Sovran Nrecaj, Kosovo, for his untitled video essay. They will split the third prize of USD1000 between them. Below please find more information on the winners along with excerpts from their essays:

Millan Tarus
FIRST Prize

Millan Tarus

Millan Tarus is a Kenyan filmmaker. His practice is a mediation with the self and others, wrestling with our place in the world, moving towards the unknown. His works include A 1000 ways to miss home, a video installation developed during the 2024 Art Omi residency; Stero, a short film that premiered in the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024; Organetto & Purgatorio developed during Cinemadamare Film Festival 2023. Millan is the recipient of a 2024 Prince Claus Seed Award. His upcoming projects include Stero II, a feature film on struggle for self in a violent world and Home, a meditation on eternal unrest.

I met him during winter. I was walking home, toes freezing, missing everything about home. There he was, a tall figure of light piercing through the roof of the bus stop. He smelled like an old man trapped in a young man’s body. I knew his kind from one of my mother’s spectral encounters. We sat in silence, sulking at the cold. When the bus came, he entered my heart and followed me.

When we arrived at the house, he told me to boil a cup of tea and describe the texture of the steam on my skin. I became like a bird, breaking down each meal into words and descriptions for him to feed.

He told me he came to Europe to chase a dream but his blood never returned home. He has been marooned for decades, roaming the streets with nothing but a song. I was too scared to ask him how he died. 

Excerpt from “Eternal Unrest” by Millan Tarus

 

Ömer Tevfik Erten
SECOND Prize

Ömer Tevfik Erten aka ÖTE (all pronouns), is a photo-based interdisciplinary artist. Their works explore themes of identity, nomadism, death, resistance, and transgression. Engaging with gender and body politics, ÖTE constructs narratives that challenge boundaries and seek to contribute to a collective healing process for the traumas of queer+ and minority groups. Between 2020 and 2023, they co-curated the queer solidarity network ‘Through The Window Project’ and received the Prince Claus Fund’s Seed Awards in 2022. Currently pursuing their education at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, ÖTE lives and works in Istanbul.

We are leaving behind a period where borders have been redrawn and profound crises facing the earth have come to light. The year 2024 has forced us to confront both physical and existential boundaries through the genocide in Gaza, the devastating effects of climate disasters, and endless wars. Borders are not merely geographical lines; they are wounds through which we explore who we are and who we might become.

Every border is a wound, and in that wound lies the beginning of both pain and healing. This year has allowed me to look into these wounds and explore their healing power through my art.

excerpt from “Line and Beyond” by Ömer Tevfik Erten

Shoty Ndjoli
Third Prize

Shoty Ndjoli is an eco-activist visual artist and musician based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. He works in multifaceted research around masks, sound, heritage and identity. Inspired by the practice of his ancestors of the Mongo tribe of Congo, he extends and modernizes traditional masks and instruments with aspects of contemporaneity, futurism and pop culture.  He creates his masks and instruments made out of trash and found objects. Shoty sees his masks as face sculptures, which manipulate the face and thus the identity.

For this new work, he created a series of masks, which play with the symbolism of face scars. He creates new faces by mapping the memory of injuries onto them, reminding us of the challenging landscape in our current human crisis. The poem connects the contradictory concepts of nature, war, healing and ancestral knowledge.

 

…so what happens to the faces
which bear the shame of today ́s humans
what happens to the faces
distorted, not recognizing their own images
what happens to the faces
full of scars
not only that of the horrors of wars
but the mechanism of hurting
what happens to the faces
where the scars re-draw the lines
create new maps of living
a cartography of pain
forced onto every single face.

Excerpt from “Bite the Bitter” by Shoty Ndjoli

Sovran Nrecaj
Third Prize

Sovran Nrecaj, was born in 1998 in Ferizaj, Kosovo. He studied film directing at the Sarajevo Film Academy. He has worked as writer, director and producer in different film projects, and made a couple of short films, such as: “Sea by the river and river by the sea”, “Sovran, Cуверен”, “A usual Sunday”, “Broken Tower”. His films have been going around festivals, winning a few prizes. His last film project is named “Fran and Verka; or a usual day in an abandoned village” and had its world premiere at Sarajevo Film Festival. He is currently working on his first feature film.

Below please find Sovran’s award-winning video:

 

The outstanding nature of the entries demanded that we award Honourable Mentions to the seven writers listed below:

Gloria Kiconco, Uganda

Sadiq Al-Harasi, Yemen

Reza Baastani, Iran

Mariah Reodica, Philippines

Maame Prempeh, Ghana

Lady Donli, Nigeria

Chris Luza, Peru

In February we will be bringing out a special issue of the best submissions received for PREE’s special Fertile Ground issue featuring all the winning entries and more.

A big thank you to all who participated in PREE’s Fertile Ground writing competition and CONGRATULATIONS to our winners! In an expansionary mode the success of the Fertile Ground Competition has made us decide to open one of the two issues we publish each year to entries from the Global South.

The image anchoring this post is Scar Mask II by Shoty Ndjoli.